Respawning in Hyper Scape is also unique. 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. The way Hyper Scape handles the shrinking map mechanic is unique too. 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. 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. This pairs well with the movement in Hyper Scape, which feels very fast and free. And if players find they want to switch up their abilities, they can find replacements all over the map. 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. 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. 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. The guns don't feel overwhelming in a firefight. 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. 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. Crown Rush clashingĪt 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 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. 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. 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.
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. Crashing down into Neo Arcadia in individual pods feels more freeing than hopping out of a single vehicle.