A Thrilling Fast-Paced Battle Royale With MOBA Elements

Hero shooters are coming back in a big way, aren’t they? After what felt like a brief slowdown following multiple failed attempts to capture the popularity of Overwatch (on release), we’re now seeing more and more crop up in the live-service market. I can’t say I’ve been too interested in revisiting the genre after my brief stint with Overwatch in 2017 – that was until I played SUPERVIVE (previously codenamed Project Loki).

In May, I participated in a media playtest for SUPERVIVE as I was pitted against my peers in a couple of hours of classic battle royale action. I was paired with a developer from Theorycraft and we clicked fairly fast, getting to the final two squads in our first game of duos (the standard battle royale mode but with teams of 2, rather than 4).

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As a League of Legends player, the aerial camera was something I was immediately familiar with. As were characters having auto attacks and abilities, and the ability to build your character differently depending on which items you find. Another MOBA-like aspect of SUPERVIVE is that you level up your character’s abilities by farming creeps, adding a layer of efficiency to the early game.

If the first squad you encounter has been diligently farming creeps while you’ve been wandering around aimlessly, the fight is going to be a whole lot tougher. This applies to ‘hot dropping’ too when you drop into the same area as other teams then there’s often a rush to kill creeps so you can level up and access more of your abilities. It’s a neat little switch-up from other battle royales which are so loot-focused.

I immediately took to the character Shrike, a long-ranged character damage-per-second character. The play style of Shrike is similar to an attack-damage-carry from League and I just didn’t connect with the other characters as I did Shrike. I love basic attacks and doing absurd amounts of damage with well-timed skillshots so she was right up my alley.

After a couple of duos games that we narrowly lost, we started doing squads instead. This paired my duo and I with another two players, mostly long-term community members who were actively working with Theorycraft to improve Project Loki.

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The passion of the community is something that struck me during these lobbies. These people were actively trying to make my experience as fun and fulfilling as it could be. These individuals were trusted by Theorycraft to show the best side of SUPERVIVE to the media, and they certainly fulfilled this role. The people we were paired with were more than willing to guide me around, answer questions about their experiences with SUPERVIVE and just make the experience a positive one in general (thank you, Tom Kick).

At times I was simply a fly on the wall as ‘veteran’ players discussed the high-level meta and some of the budding game’s more complex concepts. The passion of the community is the main reason I believe SUPERVIVE will succeed. There are already people so invested in a game in alpha that they’re speculating on a high-level meta, and there’s already a culture within the SUPERVIVE community wherein the developers can trust their experienced players to operate in a manner that reflects well on the developer and the game in general. That’s quite impressive for a game and community in their infancy.

In a post-playtest interview with executive producer Jessica Nam, I also got the sense that Theorycraft is optimised for creating an engaging live-service experience. It’s very difficult to get a live-service game off the ground, but the combined experience of developers with a proven track record of working on the biggest competitive multiplayer titles gives me a lot of hope.

The squads games went even better for us, and we ended up winning two of them. As I played more, I began to learn the concepts enough to appreciate what makes SUPERVIVE different to other hero shooters. The teamfights are fun and chaotic, but still easily trackable because of the camera. A downside of something like Overwatch is that you (and spectators) can become lost in the action and fail to appreciate the skill expression, a top-down camera ensures everything is still easily identifiable.

I adored late-game fights, the frenetic action of fighting in such a small circle with four or five other squads. It’s the tensest part of the game by far, showing Theorycraft has replicated the feeling you get playing the late-game in battle royales like Apex Legends. An aspect of SUPERVIVE that could be polarising is its comeback mechanics. If one member of a team survives in an early to mid-game teamfight then there’s a reasonable chance they’ll be able to revive their whole team using beacons and other mechanics. This will inevitably delight some players and frustrate others.

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In the same vein, SUPERVIVE has a glider mechanic where you can fly for a limited amount of time. If you take damage while flying you’ll be immediately knocked to the floor and stunned (or instantly killed if you’re damaged above open air). However, in reality, the glider is used as a very effective escape tool and your chances of catching someone who has glided away are slim in most environments. The difficulty of finishing a team you’ve got the best of is a polarising aspect of SUPERVIVE.

The characters of SUPERVIVE have been designed around the gameplay they’re intended to enable, rather than the other way around. The developer I was attached to during my playtest informed me that much of the team still refers to the characters by their working titles, like ‘Rocket Jumper’ rather than the identities that were later attached to them. This reflects the gameplay-focused development of the game.

The graphics of SUPERVIVE have been balanced for visual clarity, and so the game runs smoothly on older machines. It can still be quite pretty at times when there’s a striking visual effect, and the ‘neon-apocalyptic’ theme allows the art team to insert pops of colour here and there. Areas of the map have a nice variety and are best experienced while zooming around on the bullet train that loops the map (a feature I love, by the way).

After my first playtest ended, I was eager to jump back in. So I did. The next general playtest took place a couple of weeks later and I took the opportunity to test the game’s arena mode. Arena is a 4v4 best-of-nine mode where you can win by eliminating all of your opponents or by holding the objective as the timer runs out. If anyone played Battlerite, Arena is for them. I enjoyed the mechanical expression of the mode and it’s very nice that it’s already an option. As in League of Legends, I use the faster more casual modes as a detox between competitive queues.

All in all, I’m very excited to follow the progress of SUPERVIVE and continue to participate in playtests. I think it’s a game that MOBA enjoyers will be drawn to, especially if they like the format of battle royales like Apex but don’t enjoy first-person shooters. There’s already a dedicated community at work, and Theorycraft has produced a compelling launching pad for what could be a live-service behemoth.