Monday, August 23, 2021

Spellbreak, a Battle Royale I could love -- #Blaugust2021 Day 23

Typically I've avoided playing Battle Royale games. I've never played Forknife. I mean, I've eaten with a fork and a knife, but I haven't played the game. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the dad joke) You can't live in this day and age and not know what Fortnite is, but my natural tendency is to have a revulsion to the super popular. I'm sure if I played it, I'd have fun with it, but up to this point, it's been more of a sport that you watch instead of a game that you play. 

A few of my peeps have even tried to get me to play it with them, but I've managed to sidestep my way out of playing at every turn. My fascination with Fortnite is merely at the successful monetization end of the equation. What game makes billions of dollars? It's insane. 

Before Fortnite, I would watch a streamer play H1Z1, and it was a lot of fun to watch. But actually playing PUBG? H1Z1? Fortnite? I don't know they're not really my cup of tea. I did play a couple of mobile battle royales, like Brawl Stars and Bullet Echo, and I really enjoyed both of those.

. . . and that leads me to the topic at hand. On my previous computer I had loaded Spellbreak because this was the one Battle Royale that actually looked really good to me. It's like you take the Wizard class based system of Wizard101, mix it with an Apex Legends style Battle Royale, throw in a synergistic spell combination complexity, but you also make it so every character plays a bit like Pharah from Overwatch. Amazing. That's exactly the battle royale I want to play.

Stingite, as a Stoneshaper

So my old self played through the tutorial of Spellbreak on my old computer and I noped out because of the lag. On my new computer, it was game on, and so yesterday I loaded up that crazy, chaotic spell casting Battle Royale and gave it a dozen plays or so.

The verdict? It was every bit of fun as I expected it to be. I even won my second game out of the gate . . . there's absolutely no way that wasn't versus bots. LOL. After this win, I started into exactly the pattern I thought I would when playing this game: generally NOT winning. Because with Battle Royales you have to understand that for the most part you're not going to win, that's just expected.

This duel didn't end well for me

I also experienced exactly what I thought I would from the game queues, which was waits of 3-5 minutes per match. From what I understand it only gets worse as you get higher rank as well. If you look at the Steam Charts for Spellbreak it paints a grim picture the past three months of downward decline  . . . and that's DURING the summer months. 

A had a couple great kills or "exiles" yesterday and a few intense battles that felt amazing. This two person kill where I flew in between a couple people battling and got a 2x kill was a really satisfying moment. Haha!


I'm happy my new computer can handle the game, and that I can finally try out the one Battle Royale I always wanted to give a spin.

Happy Dueling!

1 comment:

Tipa said...

That 2-for-1 was awesome :-)