Much of the fun from any good battle royale game comes from feeling big on the big screen, and hoo boy! If there’s one thing the Rumbleverse is good at, it’s your chance to get into the big plays. The latest news from Iron Galaxy Studios (developers of Acrobatic and parts 2 and 3 of Killer Instinct) Rumbleverse is a free-to-play, melee combat royale game with gameplay Fortnite‘y, but still charming cartoon art style, infused with all the glitz and grandeur of professional wrestling. One moment you’ll be Irish-Smash your opponent against the wall for a brutal wall combo, the next you’ll be corpses from skyscrapers, and occasionally toss them into the ocean . It’s silly fun at its best, and despite some painful moments in the form of slow matchmaking, many bugs involve latency and a store that feels a bit clunky and expensive in comparison. Given what the competition has to offer (at least true of the port) Rumbleverse is nonetheless one of the most unique battles in recent memory and a breath of fresh air in the crowdsourced genre.
The basics of Rumbleverse will be familiar: 40 players drop onto a giant map, move around for loot, then battle it out, until only one remains. But Rumbleverse doesn’t copy and paste its gameplay, and so it just tweaks every element of that well-established formula in interesting ways.
For one, there’s no traditional gear or inventory – no guns, no armor, no grenades, and no super-specific attachments or accessories to manage. Instead, you fight with your fists, feet, and whatever street sign you can rip off the ground. (There’s still some loot to collect: instead of looking for gear, you collect stat-boosting protein powders to increase your health, stamina, or damage; and also collect guidebooks. skill guide that teaches you many special moves.) What I love about this is that Rumbleverse completely avoids the feeling of helplessness that most battle royales have at the start of a match when you’re stuck on zero. have weapons. It makes early skirmishes a lot more fun when you’re in a hot starting zone – you don’t have to immediately run and try to find the nearest weapon to defend yourself. Some of the funnest things I’ve had are lounging on top of the giant trophy statue and trying to knock everyone out at the start to get all the high value loot lying on top. It’s like a small victory in itself.
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The hand-to-hand combat moves are largely adapted straight from the ropes of a WWE match – mist, smoky, and your super, just to name a few – but then there are a few that take it. Inspired by the world of video games. Features the classic Izuna Drop from Gaiden ninjaone WWF No Mercy– the inspirational low shot that can be used as a reverse from the ground, and an aerobatic kick called the “Wreck’t Shot”, well, if you don’t know where that is from, you need to perfect on PS2- JRPGs era.
Ready to object
It certainly follows that the developer of Rumbleverse is partly responsible for one of the best fighting games of the last decade in Killer Instinct, because it is easy to see the sensibility of the fighting game. Fighting is at the heart of the Rumbleverse’s combat. The fight largely revolves around the same type of rock-paper-scissors system that most fighting games adhere to: Defend the beat, the defense grappling beat, and the grappling beat attack. Of course, there’s more nuance thanks to the addition of special attacks, weapon attacks, power attacks, and super moves, but overall, Rumbleverse’s combat system is easy to understand even when just glance.
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But there’s so much more to it, and mind games are available in every interaction. Do you rush in with a risky dropkick and hope that they really do anything other than just block? Do you rush in and then roll to try to prime an attack? Just like any good fighting game, Rumbleverse keeps my brain working at full speed in every encounter and feels out of the box by reading and reacting appropriately to my actions. they are the best.
Even outside of the spiritual aspect of the battle, the actual mechanics are top-notch. You can spend your stamina dodging certain special move animations and performing some super-smooth combos, or trick your opponents into thinking it’s their turn to attack; you can use charged attacks to stun enemies long enough for Irish to hit them against the wall, allowing you to continue wall combos, you can use a faster super move trigger for super combos his move; and the list goes on and on. I feel like every time I play, I learn some new technique that I never knew before. Just an incredible amount of thought has gone into every aspect of combat design.
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It’s true that the Rumbleverse can do a better job of actually teaching this to us. The only tutorials are locked in Playground mode, which is part practice, part instruction and needs to be lined up like a regular match. The information inside it is great, but I can’t help but wish it was offline and the instructions inside it can be found elsewhere as well.
There’s only one map at the moment, but it’s huge and there’s a lot of places to fight, each favoring a specific type of battle. Fighting along the coast makes you especially wary of throws, as a giant spin or Irish Whip can send you flying to a flooded grave in no time; Suburban neighborhood combat gives you the chance to hide in the bushes to recover or lie in ambush; and fighting in the heart of Grapital City will make you always keep your eyes on the sky for fear of the flying elbows exploding.
Extreme Rules
The Rumbleverse has some of the typical battle royale formula differences tucked away in its tights. First, it incentivizes everyone to get into the game and put themselves at risk by rewarding them with random perks when they hit a certain amount of damage dealt. These perks don’t seem to be premature, and to be honest, I didn’t even notice them in my first few games, but they really are the difference-makers if you have the means. convenience and knowledge to use them. One will restore your health if you stand still for a period of time; another adds an explosive effect to your standard three-shot combo, making it likely to bounce off walls; and another image that will add a follow-up dive attack to your dropkick, making it deal more damage. They strike a nice balance by being powerful enough to give anyone using them an advantage, without feeling like those without them simply have no chance. They’re also just a nice random element that makes every round of the Rumbleverse feel different.
Another big difference is that the ring slowly closes at a predetermined interval, shrinking the available play space, without actually dealing any damage. Instead, in true pro wrestling style, being outside the ring will start the countdown from 10 and if you are caught outside when the count reaches 0, you will be disqualified. I love this change, especially when everything falls into the hands of the last few players and the playing field is so small you can’t help running out of the ring. It also creates some extremely tense moments when you only return before the count of 10 or try to prevent others from returning before they get the DQ’d.
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Unfortunately, while the Rumbleverse impresses on a mechanical level, on a technical level it struggled in the first few days of its launch. In addition to the tedious queuing times at startup, the occasional server disconnection and difficulty logging in, it also takes a long time to get into a match and more than a few matches I’ve played have been dropped. Affected by lag indicates that it is not enjoyable to play.
That said, there were steps taken to improve as I continued to play into launch weekend. The servers were almost unplayable the first Saturday after launching to largely problem-free the next day. Queuing and matchmaking times are still longer than I expected, but at least it’s a great indication of Rumbleverse’s ongoing health that the fixes the developers are working on are making. notable differences.
