It’s 2018 and Cyanide & Happiness has put out a battle royal, I mean “last man standing” (they’re very particular about that term), video game on PC. If you’d suggested that to me a year ago I’d have thought you were crazy. At least until after I’d asked what a battle royal game was. However, with the genre hitting what is undoubtedly its peak popularity, this partnership between Explosm, tinyBuild, and Galvanic seems to simply be par for the course. In an era, equal parts innovator and imitator, how does Rapture Rejects stack up against the completion?
Jumping into the Rapture Rejects Pre-Alpha, one is immediately struck by dedication to source material. Cyanide & Happiness is a web comic series equal parts, irreverent, NSFW, offensive and hilarious. Putting on the green and blue shirts of the cartoon cast feels right. The simple, but effective, character creator, in a subversive gesture of gender inclusion, gives players the option of dong, boobs, neither, or a combination of the two. Everyone is welcome to hell on Earth. Just as long as you can murder people like everyone else.
Much like other battle royale, I mean “last man standing” games, players are tasked with surviving in a large map until they come out as the last one alive. If you’ve played one BR you’ve played them all. Rapture Rejects hits all the notes: permadeath, huge player counts, scavenging, a constricting map and “hey that was BS, I shot him like 50 times!” Jumping into the test server myself I was greeted by a top down view of a post apocalyptic landscape. Wandering around I spotted a ruined building in which I found a nail gun, a grenade and some beer. Your viewpoint constricts as you enter a building but as I left, I caught the tail end of another player walking in the street. Thinking I had the jump on him I fired several shots, of which only a few hit. Turning around he blasted me with a huge spear gun, killing me almost instantly.
Weapons are a highlight of Rapture Rejects with creative death machines like razor CD firing pistols to garbage spewing semi-automatics. Gunplay is for the most part wildly inaccurate. But in a good way. The isometric perspective and high recoil of many weapons makes precision targeting difficult at best. Still, this lends a certain degree of charm to a genre dominated by twitch based shooters like PUBG.
Fending off rival players in RR is then more a test of bullet hell dodging skills than of catching sight of your opponent before they see you. Coupled with a roll that allows players to quickly duck behind cover when needed, agility proved most helpful for me. Cover though, is easily destructible so staying in place isn’t always possible either. I enjoyed the frenetic and fast battles. With a small, non-regenerating health bar no fight is trivial. Indeed more often than not, it’s simply not worth it to pick fights with other players.
My most successful matches of Rapture Rejects composed of me catching sight of other players, then running in the opposite direction. It’s rarely possible to judge relative power levels of your enemies. Most armor and other pickups don’t create a noticeable change in appearance (though this is likely a bug if screenshots are to tell), so any battle is risky. As the three armor levels can soak up a large amount of firepower, even catching someone in an ambush and hitting them numerous times isn’t always an indicator of success. Limping away from numerous battles is a drain on your health bar, especially considering how rare health items like bandages seem to be.
Many weapons are also quite ineffective. Only rare drops found in chests scattered around the map seem to offer the firepower needed to punch through armor. Even two on one, I was comfortably able to defeat other players armed with basic pistols. It seems advisable to avoid combat until one has spent a reasonable amount of time scavenging for these items. Much like other titles like Fortnite or PUBG, searching for gear is integral to survive.
Rapture Rejects offers a refreshing take on the battle roy-last man standing genre. With an isometric top down viewpoint, the game is instantly different from its competition. Silly off the wall visuals and fast paced, dodge heavy, combat promise a refreshing take on a genre of imitators. Still it’s difficult to see what tinyBuild has brought to the table against the big players behind Fortnite and PUBG. Rapture Rejects, in this early state seems to be a very derivative battle royale game. Minus the Cyanide & Happiness theme, which is spot on, there doesn’t seem to much that separates it from its competition. Still I’m excited to see what the team behind Rapture Rejects has up their sleeve as the game approaches launch later this year.
Check Out the Rapture Rejects Trailer:
You can wishlist Rapture Rejects for PC on Steam right now and sign up for the Alpha.
I'm a lifelong gamer who, as a child, snuck away during recess to play Oregon Trail on my school computers. I'm an omni-gamer with a wide variety of gaming interests from Soulbornes to Grand Strategy to shooters and everything in between. I'm also a huge fan of the newly burgeoning board games hobby which has produced some of the greatest analog games in history. Gaming is more than a hobby, it's a part of my lifestyle and self identity.
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