Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape is a fast and chaotic battle royale from the team behind Rainbow Six Siege

Ubisoft on Thursday featured Hyper scape, a brand new totally free Battle Royale (BR) shooting game from the Montreal team behind Rainbow Six Siege who will try to find a place in the highly competitive genre.

As confirmed by leaks earlier this week, Hyper scape is a much more futuristic BR game set in a sprawling urban city, a departure from the usual barren landscapes and apocalyptic settings used by many of its current competitors. It is also much faster and more chaotic than most gamers might be used to.

I was able to play an early “technical test” version of the game on PC for about three hours last week. I was paired in a random squad with two others, and we were allowed to queue as many times as we wanted during our demo session with other Ubisoft reviewers, streamers, and players.

To get it out of the way, I’ll say now that Hyper scape It is fun. The game, a first-person and not a third-person shooter, is extremely polished and offers some genuine innovations not seen in any other BR game on the market. For example, the final circle of any game goes from a kill-or-die competition to a capture-the-flag game, where teams try to beat their opponents or hold onto the coveted crown for 45 seconds.

The big question, though, will be whether this is a victim of the growing BR fatigue of the gaming community. Hero Shooter from Amazon Game Studios Melting pot, which had its own BR mode, it fell a month after launch, but Ubisoft is much more established and has a much better track record. Still, Hyper scape it will have to prove, when it launches later this year, that it is unique and more fun than it is today to drive away players who have sunk hundreds of hours in titles like Apex Legends and Fortnite.

Another complicating factor is Ubisoft’s current calculation of sexual harassment complaints by high-ranking executives. The company has promised to address the issues and completely overhaul its internal culture, but makes this an especially difficult time for the publisher to launch a new property.

Unlike most Battle Royales, this one actually has an appearance of history. Set in the far future, fictional tech company Prisma Dimensions oversees a realistic metaverse-style virtual world similar to OASIS in Ready Player One. It’s called Hyper Scape, and it features a competitive sport called Crown Rush, where players materialize in cyberspace and battle each other for a shot at victory. (Ubisoft even released a good fake website for Prisma DImensions after the game leaked earlier this week.) It’s not exactly a first-rate narrative world, but at least it’s something.

I know what you may be thinking: “Please, no, not another battle royale.” That is completely fair. In the past three years, the industry has dumped mountains of money and teams of game designers to create last-person video games, leaving behind a graveyard of failed early access projects and half-hearted cash gains from top studios. Ubisoft says that it has been building this game for about two years, suggesting FortniteThe early success of was the impetus.

Today, some BR games are giant, lucrative, and legitimately fun experiences, like Call of Duty: Warzonewhile others are quiet, popular, and fundamentals-focused like Respawn’s Apex Legends and PUBG Mobile. Fortnite, largely responsible for initiating the Battle Royale trend alongside the PC version of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, is still experimenting and expanding on what kind of game it can be.

And now there is Ubisoft’s Hyper scape. It has all the expected elements; That includes a shrinking circle to contain combat in narrower rooms and foyers for up to 100 players, all vying for a coveted first place. But I do think Ubisoft has unveiled some really exciting innovations here that set Hyper scape Aside, and I’m pretty sure the game will find an audience, if not it will drive some fans of the more hectic BR titles like Apex Legends and War zone.

The game’s greatest strengths lie in its unique combat rhythm and in-game abilities, as well as the changes to the BR formula offered by Ubisoft. Unlike most Battle Royales and Hero Shooter, there are no rarity systems or weapon mods, no unique hero abilities or ultimate attacks, and no consumable health or armor items.

Instead, each player in Hyper scape You can use any weapon and upgrade it to its full potential by finding other versions in the world. At the touch of a button, you can combine the two to create a more powerful weapon. The same goes for abilities: instead of relying on specific character traits, anyone can find these abilities as loot and equip up to two at a time. These include a healing ability, one that allows you to raise a wall of cover, and one that locks your character in a protective sphere that allows you to jump to safety.

These skills are very important because, like the amount and time of use of healing items in games like Apex Legends and War zoneThey dictate how easy it is to recover and re-engage with an opponent and how long these fights can last as a result. In Hyper scapeYou can participate in multi-team fights lasting long swaths of the entire match through a mix of sheer luck, using clever skills, and switching between hiding in buildings and maneuvering around rooftops. It’s easy to duck inside a building, lift a wall to cover yourself, and drop a healing pit on the ground to recover. It’s also easy to find yourself fighting six to nine people out of nowhere, creating a feeling of total chaos at any time.

What helps control the messiness of these fights is an extreme level of mobility. In Hyper scapeThere is no fall damage, and all roofs are passable. There’s also a quick glide and double jump at your disposal so you can maneuver in midair or stroll inside buildings at blinding speed. There are circles of light on almost every street corner or large open area that throws it high into the air to help it move easily from the ground to the rooftops.

The result of all of these systems combined is a kind of BR combat unlike anything I’ve ever played before. It has the prolonged and skill-focused feel of a game of Supervision with the speed and the unadulterated madness of the best of Apex Legends and War zone Fights On top of that, you’re literally spending half the match flying through the air. It’s exciting to play in a way that few BR games can still achieve today and I suspect it will feel novel for many players accustomed to something slower.

As for the changes in the BR format, Hyper scape bring some interesting ideas to the table. When you die, you are not knocked out. There are no demolition and reactivation systems. Instead, you become a kind of specter of the battlefield. You can move around and watch what happens as if you were alive, but only your teammates can see you and you cannot fire a weapon.

His goal, in that state, is to search for his currently living teammates and find a spawn point that he can use. Those dots are randomly placed across the map or on the bodies of deceased opponents. Once there, you can queue to reappear, but your teammate must come to activate the process, risking his own life in the process. This seems designed to keep players active in games, even when they may lose their first or second fight from the start.

As the circle closes, players don’t experience a storm or poisonous gas as expected. Instead, the world begins to become transparent. The buildings become transparent until you can break through the walls, and eventually you will start taking damage over time. The benefit is that it’s easy to get back to the safe zone without having to deal with obstructing objects, but the downside is that it’s also easy to see opponents and to be seen as you rush to enter.

When the final circle closes, the game transforms into a flag capture contest, with the title element in Crown Rush descending from the sky and appearing on the map. If you hold it for 45 seconds, you win, but any other team can see where you are on the map. In my experience playing this part of a match, Hyper scape It becomes an almost different game and involves a high level of strategy to succeed.

Ubisoft has some cool streaming ideas planned for Hyper scape, too. The developer is working on a Twitch integration that will allow viewers to decide on random map events, such as low gravity and unlimited ammo, that occur over short periods of time. The same integration will also allow streamers to instantly queue up to watch matches with viewers at the push of a button.

It is clear when playing the game, even for a few hours, that a lot of effort and effort has been expended Hyper scape much more than a late attempt in the game to capitalize on a trend. The biggest sign of your success will be how fast it grows; Apex Legends It is clearly Ubisoft’s main competitor here, and that game grew to tens of millions of players after a single week. Ubisoft is intelligently targeting not only the PC market, but also the console.

So the ingredients are there – it all depends on whether players are willing to give another free game an ever-decreasing amount of their attention. But right now, it seems like Hyper scape worth it.

Update July 2, 2:52 pm ET: He clarified that Ubisoft Montreal is the main developer in Hyper scape, and not Sweden-based Massive Entertainment, the Ubisoft studio answers for The division.