Battle Royale

I hadn’t heard about The Cycle before yesterday but it’s free, it’s on the Epic Store and someone wanted to try co-op, so I downloaded it and we played a few rounds.

In short, they call it a PvEvP game, it’s a shooter with co-op and PvP.

The tutorial is good, it explained most of the stuff in a concise manner, only missing one essential thing (‘c’ to melee). You run around doing small objectives “click 3 terminals”, “find 5 drones in the vicinity”, “defend a little mining drill for a minute and collect the mined resources” and if you have a little money, you can buy weapons and other upgrades (for this match) which you keep when you die. You can respawn once per game.

It’s pretty. It totally reminds me of WildStar with it’s bright and colorful world (but not garish). The soundtrack also seems nice. The voiceovers… no, not so good. You can choose between 5-6 (cosmetic) archetypes and even just as a free to play starter I liked the variety. Nothing fancy, but enough options for a shooter (not an RPG) to make me happy.

The gameplay is fine. I thought it was too easy (even as a total noob FPS player), and you need to reload very often, but bullets seem to be unlimited.

Once we got the gist of what we were supposed to do, we had a lot of fun with the PvE part but most of the other teams made short work of us in the final minutes of Battle Royale PvP. More like this “oh, I see someo… I’m dead” – that’s maybe normal if you just play your first 3 games, but why waste 10 minutes on meaningless PvE content if you just die on sight from another player?

The crafting system seems nice. You somehow gather mats while playing and between matches you can upgrade/mod the guns you would buy during a match to have better/other stats.

We might try Deep Rock Galactic (on Steam) instead. Yes, that’s a bit damning. Played 3 rounds, loved the first half of the game play (but not sure how long the fun would last) and be kinda meh on the last, defining half of the game play. But maybe it’s just two old casual gamers not wanting to take part in this, but our third regularly plays Quake Champions and Battlefield and whatnot and he kinda agreed. PvE and PvP maybe just don’t mix well for us in this game. I’d still encourage you to try it out, if it’s your thing it gave a really good first impression.