The release of Call of Duty: Warzone on PC and consoles renewed a lot of people’s interest in the battle royale genre. Once a red-hot game mode a couple years ago, battle royales have maintained their prominence despite finding more competition with other popular genres like autochess and more traditional multiplayer shooters, particularly on mobile.
Our rating: :: BEST ROYALE STANDING :: Read Review »
The next big battle royale game on mobile is finally here. Yesterday, Apex Legends Mobile dropped onto iOS and serves up a modified version of Respawn Entertainment's smash multiplayer hit that is custom tuned for touch and mobile play. I have not played a lot of the console and PC version of this game, but in my limited time with Apex Legends Mobile so far it does, in fact, seem to capture a lot of the original game's spirit, tension, and flow.
To check out the game in action from the initial boot, through the tutorial, and on to real matches, check out the video above. For some more detailed impressions, read on below.
I spent the better part of my weekend playing Flappy Royale. I didn’t necessarily want to. I just felt like I had to. It’s a hypnotic experience that’s way too easy to just keep playing.
Flappy Royale is the brainchild of Orta Therox, Em Lazer-Walker, and Zach Gage. It's a very simple idea: Take the the rules of Battle Royale games (e.g. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends) and apply them to Flappy Bird. 100 players play as birds that jump out of a bus. From there, they must fly between as many pipes as possible until one player is deemed the champion.
The game controls pretty much exactly like Flappy Bird did back in 2013. The only real differences are the hopping out of the bus (presumably inspired by the Fortnite Battle Bus) and 99 ghost birds flapping on screen with you, all competing for the number one spot.
This latter element—the ability to see other players play while you do—is the secret sauce that makes Flappy Royale such a tantalizing challenge. You can always see your competition flapping alongside you, and you want beat all of them. If you can’t do that, maybe you settle for getting a top 50 finish before diving in again to see if you can do better.
Although it’s not officially released, anyone can go and download the beta release of the game here. In this early state though, the game is already quite popular. Here are some stats Orta Therox shared about the game over the weekend:
Oh… Damn. I was doing the stats wrong.
600,000 games were played on mobile native. 1,300,000 games were played on web.
Current Flappy Royale statistics: 20 games started per second right now, with 600,000 games so far. Looks like folks average about 50 plays per session.
2 million games of Flappy Royale is really impressive, especially considering it populates each of those games with 100 players. Where it starts feeling downright magical is when you consider that all of these matches start pretty much instantly.
The way Flappy Royale eliminates any sort of queue times for matches is ingenious, and probably another big reason for the game’s stickiness. Instead of filling matches with bots or waiting for 100 live players to play a level at once, the game pits you against the ghost data of the last 99 players who played the level before you. In other words, you’re always playing against other people, but you don’t have to wait for them to log in for you to do so.
Right now, Flappy Royale really feels like it has huge potential. It successfully distills the most thrilling aspects of Battle Royale into a really tight mobile package. A lot of this has to do with how quick and easy it is to play ten rounds without blinking, so here’s to hoping the game doesn’t get too bloated with extra features or monetization schemes before it officially releases.
What happens when you take the battle royale template and mix it into a more mobile shape? Well, what happens is Battlelands Royale. It's like if Fortnite had a little brother who wanted to copy its elder sibling, and did so in the most adorable way.
You get everything you get in the likes of Fortnite (apart from the building). There's shooting, a drop zone, equipment to discover, and an ever-shrinking playfield upon which to try and slaughter every other player and be crowned the champion.
But does simplifying things make them better? That's the question we're going to ask in this here article - is Battlelands Royale better than Fortnite?
Battle royale games are all the rage on the App Store at the moment. A couple of weeks ago we looked at the origins of the genre, but now it's time to get the crystal balls out and think about what might be the future for the giant deathmatches we all know and love. With PUBG and Fortnite both available for iOS now, and a good handful of clones out there as well, what can the genre do to stay relevant in a world as changeable as our own? Or is this going to be another flash in the pan genre that falls by the wayside before it's really had the chance to grow? Read on to find out what we think.
The history of the battle royale genre isn't a long one. While the nascent parts of the experience have existed ever since players first started killing one another online, it's really only in the past six years that the genre has coalesced into something specific, with distinct parts that define whether a game does or doesn't fit into the specific pigeonhole.
Fortnite and PUBG might be the names connected to the massive online shooters now, but it wasn't always that way. In fact, the genre started out thanks to a number of strange confluences in the pop-culture zeitgeist. And the coming together of those ideas wasn't the preserve of companies and focus groups - a good deal of the battle royale genre stems from its players. It's those ideas, and those players, we need to trace to understand the behemoth that's barreling through the App Store at the moment.
