The battle royale genre has experienced a burst in popularity within the past few years, and along with the major successes, there have been plenty of games that haven’t lived up to the hype. While shooting people with guns will always be fun, the Watchers Beta felt to be more the latter. Watchers, by developer Blindfold and publisher Alawar Premium, is your standard battle royale but with the key gimmick being that after dying, you can “watch” over and affect the battle in a variety of ways. This includes giving certain players more loot or guessing the winner of a fight among others. This main difference, while making the game unique, doesn’t necessarily make the game more fun to play, and in my opinion hinders the battle royale experience more than it helps.
The core of Watchers operates similar to any other of the genre. You drop onto a map with nothing and search out ways to hunt down the other players. Because the perspective is top-down, there’s no aiming down sights, which was slightly disappointing to me, but I can understand the artistic difference. After being killed by another player, you are transferred into watcher mode (which, I might add, has strangely peaceful music for the setting). As mentioned before, this mode lets you interact with the live players on the battlefield. This sounds cool in theory, but without a dog in the fight, it’s not very entertaining. Besides wanting the guy who killed me to lose, I don’t exactly know who to bet on or who to help out. Not only that, but there’s currently no real reason to be doing this. It’s like going to a horse race broke and without having ever seen the horses run: I’ve no idea who will win and I don’t get anything out of it if they do. It’ll still be someone else’s win, even if I call the right shot. All I want to do is get back into the action. Granted, it does seem like there are plans in the works to incorporate the points earned during the watching phase into a shop on the main menu. It’ll be a waiting game to see whether these updates improve the gameplay, but as of now, I wouldn’t call this game playable. It’s not fun, and I’m unconvinced that the gimmick will ever work, even with more work put into it. Being a beta version doesn’t save the titular mechanic of Watchers from being more tiring than it is entertaining.
Here is the Watchers Beta Trailer:
Watchers is set to launch 2H 2019 for PC via Steam.
I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.
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