If you’d forgotten about Hyper Scape, Ubisoft‘s new free-to-play Battle Royale, you’re not the only one. The game leaves its Beta period tomorrow Tuesday 11th and makes its first appearance on consoles. The fast-paced arena shooter will launch with a Season Pass and some new additions.
Since the game was announced last month the hype surrounding it has died down somewhat. In my Beta review, I talked about the game’s best features and its worst features, and also why it might not work so well on consoles.
It’s hard to say how well Hyper Scape will perform at this point. The surprise launch and Twitch drops meant viewership was up for a few days, with huge streamers such as Tfue running 24hour Hyper Scape streams, but in the following four weeks the hype has died down a lot.
That’s in part due to the huge release of Fall Guys – a Battle Royale that really has done something different with the genre. Despite Hyper Scape’s potential as a competitive BR – with its twitchy shooting mechanics and fast-paced gameplay – the title is definitely facing some problems.
One of the biggest problems is how the game will perform on consoles. Twitchy shooters are a thing for PC mouse and keyboard players. With the current debate around mouse and keyboard versus controller in the Apex Legends competitive scene, it’ll be interesting to see how much aim assist is put into Hyper Scape.
It’s also the pace of Hyper Scape which becomes eventually exhausting. This is a game with a significant skill-ceiling, especially when it comes to tracking targets and mastering the very smooth movement. With the use of plenty of different Hacks and some changes to weapon balance so far, this game doesn’t feel like one that is going to appeal to the casual console player.
Lastly, the dev decisions with the most recent patch (0.5) have caused some concerns in the small but active Hyper Scape community. The biggest change was to dramatically increase the cooldowns on the various Hack abilities, such as the Invisibility and Slam hacks. This also meant that the guns in the game received a big boost to the TTK, which was very slow.
Feelings about these changes have proven to be divisive. This isn’t the first time that Ubisoft have handled an FPS game (Rainbow Six Siege is still going strong to this point) so there is some hope that the game continues to receive the right changes. I’ll be waiting to see how the game performs at launch tomorrow – you can download the game for free on PC, Xbox and PlayStation.