The best Battle Royale games | From Fortnite to PUBG and beyond
Unless you’ve been stranded on an island (maybe with 99 other people?), you have probably heard of the global, uncontrollable explosion of the battle royale genre. Everyone fighting for survival, wrestling over resources, and taking out the competition by any means necessary suddenly became the hot new thing at the end of 2017 due to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It has been launched to even more ludicrous new heights this year with the meteoric rise of Fortnite.
If you’re hoping to get into the biggest thing to hit gaming since Minecraft, and throw yourself at a whole horde of other people jumping at the chance to make you very dead indeed in the process, here are five of the best and most interesting Battle Royale games you can play right now.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG as it’s more commonly known, is the archetype for the entire genre. Created by Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, who was previously known for his battle royale mode for the popular ArmA 2 mod DayZ, it’s PUBG that is responsible for the explosion of the genre in the past year.
100 players jump out of a plane flying over a vast, deserted island, but only one can come out of it alive. In the various buildings, ruins and sheds spread across the landscape, weapons, equipment and armour can be scavenged, however finding them often means putting yourself at risk of being killed by other players in the process. Add in the constantly shrinking bubble that marks the playable space, and each round of PUBG is a tense, violent push to the centre of the map.
PUBG is slow and tactical. Players can be hiding in any window, behind any tree, or lay down in any bush, and so keeping yourself out of their crosshairs is the primary goal. Hearing a bullet fly past your head, but not being able to pinpoint where the shooter is, is one of the most anxiety-inducing situations a game can put you in, and PUBG loves to do that constantly.
PUBG is only available on PC and early access on Xbox One, while a surprisingly playable mobile version has recently launched too. If you’re looking for a more thoughtful approach to the genre than other games such as Fortnite, though, you can’t go wrong with PUBG. If you’re hoping to see that illusive “Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!” message, we have a handy guide.
Fortnite
It seems impossible to emphasise just how humongous Epic Games’ Fortnite is right now. The mobile version is topping app store charts globally, and even data from January put the player count at a whopping 45 million. To say Fortnite is “a pretty big deal” would be a massive understatement.
Fortnite: Battle Royale, the free-to-play game mode currently available alongside a paid-for player-versus-AI Zombies mode, most closely follows PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ model. 100 players parachute onto an island, and must scavenge, loot and fight in a constantly contracting, deadly storm until only one person remains victorious.
Fortnite most significantly differs from PUBG in its construction mechanics: most things in the environment can be broken down into their base resources, which can then be used to quickly build walls and stairs. This not only opens up a whole new way to traverse the environment, but introduces tactical considerations such as sniper towers, laying traps, and quickly erecting cover while under fire.
If you’re wanting to get in to a Battle Royale game, right now Fortnite is the one to pick. Free on every platform, lively, colourful art style, and numerous updates and events are still ahead of it. You could find more information about Fortnite in our FAQ, or read our beginner’s guide before jumping in.
The Division: Survival
The Division’s Survival DLC sits at a weird place, straddling three different genres. The Division as a whole is a shooter-RPG, while the Survival DLC is, instead, part survival game and part battle royale. The end result, though, is a gripping, high-stakes experience that not even the biggest entries on this last have quite managed to emulate yet.
The Division: Survival isn’t like other battle royale modes, in that multiple people can win. The goal is to make your way to the centre of a snowed-in, virus-devastated Manhattan for extraction, dealing with AI enemies and other players along the way.
Other players are just a single threat amongst many: the cold, hunger, thirst, and a growing infection that must be kept at bay are all constant challenges, long before anyone else is even encountered. While you can be killed on the spot, uneasy alliances with other players can also form for both players to survive. Or, alternatively, they could stab you in the back at any time.
This is why Survival is such an interesting take on the genre. It does away with the almost mindless approach to combat of other entries where killing anything that moves can be a valid strategy, and makes scavenging, hiding and trusting others a crucial alternative. The goal is to escape and survive, rather than be the lone victor.
H1Z1
If you had to define a “big three” of the battle royale genre, H1Z1 would be the very, very distant third to Fortnite and PUBG. Developed by Daybreak games, it, much like Fortnite, started off as a zombie survival game before branching out into a battle royale mode that eventually became a bigger pull than its original vision. And so H1Z1, a game named after a fictional zombie virus, has no zombies at all to speak of. That’s in the original game that has since been renamed to Just Survive.
H1Z1 is a bizarre game. It’s free-to-play like Fortnite, has the more realistic art style of PUBG, but it also goes off in its own direction in some ways as well. Most notably, it features an item crafting system, so extra loot found around the map can be deconstructed to be put towards crafting armour and weapons in a pinch.
The biggest reason to check out H1Z1, though, is its newest game mode, Auto Royale. It’s much like the normal squad-based battle royales, but every team must remain in a vehicle the entire time. The core idea is still the same – a constantly constricting map, airdrops of weaponry, everybody out to kill everyone else, but each match turns into a Mad Max-esque deathrace full of traps and explosions that no other game has replicated yet.
H1Z1 may not be the most popular or the best to look at, but it’s the only one that lets you drive a car off of a ramp, drop a bomb on another team and ride the explosion to safety.
Hunt: Showdown
For a genre born from zombie survival and so defined by tension and distrust, there haven’t been a lot of battle royale games that lean into horror elements. That’s alright, though, because Hunt: Showdown does that enough to make up for it, becoming one of the most beautifully grim, relentlessly scary games in a long time.
Much like The Division’s Survival mode, Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown isn’t focused around being the last one standing. Instead, each player is assigned contracts to slay NPC monsters spread around the map, and taking out the competition at the same time is often a good strategy.
The playable space is enormous, filled with zombies and monsters to deal with. The contract boss monsters alone are amazingly horrific, with fast-moving corpse-spider-hybrids and gargantuan mutated butchers, but even the more common enemies are twisted and provide fascinating challenges. The sound direction is also sublime, as every action down to what surfaces you step on can give away your position to other players.
As with any other battle royale, the other players are still your biggest enemy, regardless of any mutated spider-people wandering about. Completing your contracts is a noisy affair, and there is nothing stopping another player from swooping in at the last second to both kill you and reap the benefits of your hard work and complete the contract for themselves. Or, to put it another way, there is nothing to stop you from doing it to somebody else.
Hunt: Showdown is still a very fresh release to Steam’s Early Access scheme. It has numerous technical issues, and could do with a few more content updates. But that doesn’t reduce the fact that it is one of the most interesting, creepy, and gorgeous-looking games to come out of the genre so far, and one you should definitely be keeping an eye on.
It’s early days for the battle royale genre, but even now there are numerous, interesting ones on the horizon. Already-released games such as Paladins and Dying Light are set to get their own versions of it soon, and who knows what will be the next big thing once Fortnite’s time in the spotlight is finally up.
Until then, though, at least we have these five to get our teeth stuck in to. Just don’t die.
