Hyper Scape Gameplay Preview - Ubisoft's Battle Royale
Ubisoft's new battle royale Hyper Scape is fast, fun, and kind of weird. Given the game's aesthetic and thematic choices, players wouldn't be remiss in thinking everything that's happening around them could easily be taking place inside the Animus from the Assassin's Creed franchise. Despite the similarities in design (and font/icon choices) Hyper Scape is a brand-new Ubisoft IP, and one which clearly hopes to wrestle players away from similar titles like Apex: Legends and Call of Duty Warzone.
Hyper Scape is a free-to-play battle royale, much like Apex Legends or Fortnite, but instead of offering the game's 100 players different abilities based on their chosen characters everyone starts on a level playing field, with no set loadouts or anything other than a melee weapon to attack with. There are special abilities available, however, but players will have to scour the map and pick them up just like their weapons. These power-ups range from incredibly useful abilities like being able to instantly summon a wall between a player and their opponents to less practical, more entertaining powers like the ability to turn into a giant bouncing ball.
Hyper Scape is set in a future where this sort of battle royale activity takes place in a virtual online world similar to that of Ready Player One (or Assassin's Creed's Animus) and acts as the primary form of entertainment. Players can squad up in groups of three and spend their pre-match wait time in a massive tower overlooking Hyper Scape's urban map. Hyper Scape's landscape is almost exclusively city, with the map being separated into different districts, and it's these districts which offer the biggest change up from the normal battle royal video game routine.
While most battle royale titles follow a similar format of utilizing an encroaching circle which damages players and grows increasingly smaller over time in order to push opponents against each other, Hyper Scape instead removes accessible map locations district by district. In the game's lore, this is called "Decay" and is evidenced by triangular black pixels appearing in areas which are about to become uninhabitable. This can be both detrimental and beneficial to players depending on the current battle situation, because the in-game districts (much like the way voting districts are in real life) are oddly-shaped and seem to be chosen at random, leading to numerous bottleneck situations where players are surrounded by decayed districts on either side but must make it through a narrow tunnel of safety before the next district collapses.
Another way Hyper Scape differs from older battle royale titles is that the game allows players to combine their weapons and powers in order to make them more useful. While battle royale games like PUBG ask players to find items and accessories in order to upgrade their weapons to their fullest potential, Hyper Scape instead asks players to only find the same gun again in order to make it more powerful through a process called Fusing. Depending on the type of weapon and the amount of times its been fused, players can see increases to things like magazine size, reload speed, and damage output.
Hyper Scape is littered with weapons and powers, letting players teleport, bounce, rocket launch, or machine-gun at their leisure pretty much all the time. There are also bounce pads and tractor beams located throughout the map, and to make traversal even easier all players are equipped with a double-jump ability that can easily become a triple-jump if the game allows for it during one of its many events.
Hyper Scape events are strange happenings which take place periodically throughout the battle, and they range from activating a low gravity field (allowing players to jump even higher) to spawning numerous health and ammo pickups all over the map. These events are also tied into Hyper Scape's real-life Twitch audience, who are able to vote on what the next event will be during a match. Check out the trailer for Hyper Scape below.
At such an early point in a battle royale's life cycle, it's impossible to tell whether the game will be embraced or shunned by the community. Hyper Scape offers enough variety and options that players will surely enjoy dozens of hours trying to find the best combination of powers and weapons, the map is large enough to allow for lots of different ways to approach enemy encounters, and the gameplay is as solid as players have come to expect from a Ubisoft title. Since the game will be free-to-play at launch, it likely won't be lacking in players, but only time will tell if they stick around long enough to make Hyper Space another common household name.