PUBG: Review

                 PUBG: Review

     Is it the best battle royale out there?

Despite its inelegant name, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was a defining game of 2017. Launching on Steam Early Access in March, it quickly reached the top of Steam’s bestseller lists and has pretty much remained there. As of December last year, it catered to 30 million players global and reached a record-breaking three million concurrent players in the same month – more than twice the previous record held by Valve’s Dota 2.

Battlegrounds gathers up to 100 players together on the same server and crowd them onto a military transport plane. The plane flies across an island while the players leap from the fuselage at their choice of time. Having parachuted to the ground, the players must then scavenge nearby buildings for weapons, body armour and other equipment, before fighting it out in a gigantic deathmatch until only one sole survivor, duo or squad remains.

Battlegrounds is often compared with the cult Japanese film Battle Royale, but the game’s true lineage resides in survival gaming, most notably the multiplayer ArmA II mod DayZ. In DayZ, players had to survive for an unlimited amount of time in a dilapidated eastern European landscape, scavenging supplies while avoiding AI zombies and player bandits. 

Consequently, the players are gradually squeezed together within an ever-tightening noose, which makes the game incredibly tense. The longer you survive, the higher the likelihood you’ll encounter other players. You’re constantly torn between reaching the next safe zone before the forcefield begins to shrink, and abandoning the relative safety of whatever building you’re scavenging and exposing yourself to potential sniper fire. Combat in Battlegrounds is a halfway house between arcade and realism. Often it amounts to long-range rifle exchanges, but close-quarters battles inside buildings also occur with relative frequency, usually involving barrages of grenades and sprays of submachinegun fire.

With the full release, the developers made several additions, including a second map – the desert landscape of Miramar – along with a bunch of new weapons, items and some of the aforementioned modes. It isn’t radically different from the Early Access game, however, and there are plenty of areas that could easily be improved.

Despite its phenomenal success, Battlegrounds still looks like a cheap knock-off of a better game. It’s visually competent but entirely uninspired, its environments are dreary, its character models and animations are basic, and it lacks the imagination of Battle Royale, The Hunger Games or The Running Man. In addition, although combat passes muster, it’s still relatively basic, while the presentation of the menus and server lobby is distinctly lo-fi.

If Battlegrounds’ supremacy is to continue, these issues need to be sorted soon. There are already, more stylish pretenders to its throne, such as Epic Games’ Fortnite, and many more games will aim to take a juicy bite out of Battlegrounds’ pie. Despite its flaws, however, Battlegrounds is a superbly thrilling multiplayer shooter; virtual hide-and-seek ‘em up was even sitting in a house for 15 minutes is fraught with tension.