'Hyper Scape' brings satisfying parkour to the battle royale genre
Out of all the big battle royale games that have been released over the past few years, Hyper Scape is the most fluid.
After playing a few hours of Hyper Scape during a closed preview on Tuesday ahead of the game’s reveal on Thursday, I was surprised not only with how easy the game was to grasp as a brand new player, but also with how the parkour-like traversal weaved into this futuristic, metropolitan, virtual battle ground turns it into such a smooth and free combat experience.
Hyper Scape will be releasing on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC this summer for free, like most battle royales, so it’s certainly worth jumping into to try for yourself.
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Entering the Hyper Scape
Most premises for battle royale games are kind of shaky. How exactly are all these people ending up in a single, weapon-filled location, battling to become the last player (or team) standing while the safe world around them slowly shrinks and shrinks?
Hyper Scape’s approach to this problem is simple: It’s all a game. Hyper Scape takes place in the year 2054 where things have become a bit more dystopian. A company called Prisma Dimension has created a virtual world called the Hyper Scape, which is an internet-like space that people can enter into as a portal to lots of different activities, including business, education, and of course battling. One of the most popular activities in the Hyper Scape is a game called Crown Rush, and that’s where the main gameplay of Hyper Scape comes in.
People join up in this virtual world to compete for glory in Crown Rush, where participants fight to either be the last survivors, or, when just a handful of players are left, capture a crown that appears nearby and hold onto it for 45 seconds while competitors try to kill them.
When you start a match, you hang out in a staging area with other players, floating high above the virtual city of Neo Arcadia, which acts as the battleground for Crown Rush. Everyone blasts down toward the city in individual pods to go gather weapons strewn about all over the place and set themselves up for victory.
It’s a pretty familiar setup if you’ve played any other battle royale game, but one major difference is that the map changes each time you start. There are nine different districts in Neo Arcadia and some of the outlying districts may not appear at the start of the game, so you can’t always drop into the same spot every time to start the game, forcing players to change up their tactics and explore more of the city at the beginning of matches.
Crown Rush clashing
At the beginning of matches, players only have a melee weapon and have to quickly find weapons and abilities if they want any success. There are pistols, a shotgun, an explosive launcher, a sniper, an automatic rifle, a huge gatling gun-type thing, and a couple of futuristic guns that shoot destructive plasma and electric balls.
There are also several different abilities that players can pick up that allow them to do things like throw up a defensive wall, turn invisible for a bit, teleport, toss a mine, jump up into the air for a destructive slam, or become encased in a big ball and hop around, which works as an effective way to get some verticality and land a mid-air sniper shot against an enemy.
Players can carry two weapons and two abilities, and if they see the same weapon or ability out in the wild, they can collect them and “fuse” their abilities and weapons to make them more useful. For example, fusing a weapon will increase its magazine capacity and damage dealt, or fusing the invisibility ability will decrease the cooldown and make the invisibility last longer.
The abilities add a fun and fresh way to mix up what would otherwise be a pretty standard run-and-gun shooter, making it feel almost like a hero shooter a-la Overwatch or Apex Legends but without making players choose their loadouts before hitting the ground. And if players find they want to switch up their abilities, they can find replacements all over the map.
This pairs well with the movement in Hyper Scape, which feels very fast and free. Players can move pretty quickly and lightly around the map, able to hop up buildings by using boost pads found all over the city, and jump from rooftop to rooftop with double jumps. After four or five matches I really started to get a hang of the free-running movement of the game and started using that verticality to my advantage.
The way Hyper Scape handles the shrinking map mechanic is unique too. Instead of an enclosing circle of gas that many battle royales use as an environmental threat, in Neo Arcadia different districts will begin decaying individually, and players have a minute to move before all the buildings in the area disappear and you start taking damage.
Respawning in Hyper Scape is also unique. When I died early on in my first couple of matches, I became a ghost able to view the action and move around, so I could still help my teammates spot enemies, but I was also directed to find a respawn point. These pop up where enemy players have died, and so as the ghost of myself I had to go to one of these respawn points and ask my squad mates to please revive, which takes just a few seconds but makes them vulnerable to enemy fire.
I was revived but shortly thereafter my squad was ambushed from multiple angles and we all died, ending our attempt at victory.
I only made it to the endgame a couple of times in Hyper Scape, witnessing the crown spawn and everyone rush into the same area guns blazing as the better-positioned player who grabbed the crown first ran and hid while a timer counted down from 45 seconds. My squads never won, but I did manage to come in second place a couple of times over a few hours, most matches lasting about 5 to 15 minutes each, which is a real sweet spot for battle royales. Any longer and you risk fatigue.
Twitch integration
One last thing that sets Hyper Scape apart from the rest of the battle royale crowd is its Twitch integration.
Players can stream their matches on Twitch and if they add an extension to their stream, they can have viewers vote during special events that happen throughout Crown Rush matches, choosing whether players will be treated to a period of unlimited ammunition, cover-ruining red arrows above every players’ head, or low gravity, to name a few.
It’s an interesting idea to bring into the game that allows viewers to feel more involved in what is otherwise a pretty passive experience.
Players streaming on Twitch also have the ability to invite viewers into their squads right from Twitch, which is a fun way to get viewers involved if you’re just messing around for a bit and want to open up your time to playing with them.
While for many regular players this won’t be a feature that’s used, it’s a very interesting and convenient nod to the way that many people consume games now: watching live streams. Hyper Scape probably won’t be the last action game to add something like this, and it will be intriguing to see how other developers take inspiration from this and augment their games for viewers.
