Announced at The Game Awards, Rumbleverse is an upcoming third-person final matchup published by Epic Games and developed by Iron Galaxy Games (who previously worked on the Killer Instinct series, as well as the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro PC ports). ). I attended an actual preview, and it definitely looks like a battle royale cartoon. What stands out the most to me is that you can put a whole cooked chicken in your pocket or throw it at someone, so that’s something.
So Rumbleverse is a 40-player free to death battle. No guns, mostly melee (though you can throw stuff at people, if you want), and you run around collecting items and power-ups that give you abilities.
I missed out on a hugely important fact already, which is that the game’s setting (arena, map, whatever you want to call it) is named Graph City. I don’t know if I hate that or not. Disappointingly, I don’t see any grappling hooks.
When you start a match, you’ll drop into a small waiting area where you can beat other players and experiment with things without actually losing anything. It’s called the Battle Barge, because of course it is, and it ends up taking you to the city (with a cannon).
In the preview, what stands out is that the areas you visit on the map change each time. Grapital City is quite a large map, but each match will choose a part of it for you to play, rather than leaving you free over the whole thing. It will prevent players from getting too comfortable and always falling to the same point, which is something that I feel other royal warriors could play more of.
Once you’ve entered a match, you can look up the magazines you’ve read to learn special moves. The developer I’ve been following immediately uses one of these to kick off another developer off a skyscraper, which never gets old. However, he was knocked down shortly afterwards by a player who stepped forward and threw a chicken at his head (the chicken is a healing item as well as a bullet, you see).
There’s a lot of verticality, with the player being able to infinitely climb the sides of buildings and use ground-based moves to take down enemies below. In the end, it looks pretty cool, like a melee version of Fortnite. Though I have to say, I’m not really a fan of its art style – but hey, this isn’t a game aimed at me at all.
Rumbleverse is available on the Epic Games Store, as well as PlayStations and Xboxes on February 8, 2022. It will also support cross-platform play and development, so you can join your friends regardless of what they’re playing. and maintain progress across platforms.
We’re staying up late covering the upcoming PC game from tonight’s lavish marketing: our hit Game Award tag everything.
