As long as at least one teammate is still alive you’re able to roam the map as an Echo (basically a ghost) to help scout out the area for your teammates, calling out enemies, loot boxes, and guns. As a result of that and the decaying map design, match pacing feels much faster than more recent battle royales, such as Apex Legends or even Call of Duty: Warzone, since Hyper Scape is almost constantly closing off sectors.Īnother thing I genuinely liked about Hyper Scape is that when you’re down, you’re not out.
Going in, Hyper Scape’s urban aesthetics and mobility were a huge draw for me, almost bringing the look and feel of arena shooters like Quake Champions or Splitgate into a battle royale with so much vertical movement and speed thanks to a double-jump, bounce pads, and plenty of movement-enhancing abilities that make high rooftops just as accessible as the streets. This resulted in a lot of unsatisfying endings where the match would just abruptly end after you try to finally corner the Crown holder and the timer runs out, declaring a winner. This isn’t too different from what can happen during the beginning and middle of matches, but since all you need to do is hold the Crown for 45 seconds, spamming the movement-enhancing abilities makes this final phase way more chaotic than strategic, since you and your last remaining opponents are desperately trying to catch up to the Crown holder. The problem with it as it exists right now is that so many teams can potentially grab the Crown when it spawns and then just run around while spamming the abilities you can pick up and be essentially uncontested. You can still just take everyone else down as usual instead, but the Crown offers an interesting new way to win if you’re not as confident in your skills to fight against multiple teams.
When a match narrows down to its last few players, a Crown will spawn somewhere on the map and, if you can hold onto it for 40 seconds, you’ll earn a victory. It forced me to stay alert at all times and expect a fight at any moment.Īnother big difference that I like in principle is that you don’t necessarily have to be the last team standing to win. Without giving any hint of where the late-match action might end up, Hyper Scape kept me guessing and constantly on the move. That pushes players around the map in a refreshingly different way than the traditional and predictable shrinking circle. It’s composed of 99 districts that gradually “decay” in random patterns over time, causing all their buildings to collapse and depriving anyone there of cover. The map, however, breaks the mold by being a polished cityscape that’s what I imagine a mashup of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Division would look like. On the surface, Hyper Scape’s 99-player battle royale currently sticks to the last-man-or-team-standing formula with just two game modes: solos and three-player squads.