Today, August 11th 2022 is the release of Rumbleverse. A game I’ve been looking forward to for a little while now. 40-person battle royale, or as they describe it, a “brawler royale”.
It’s no secret that I love a battle royale game, and I love a free-to-play cross-platform game. So Rumbleverse has a real easy task of getting me through the door. Almost too easy, to be fair.
The question is, after a few rounds, am I impressed? Will I feel the need to keep playing and does it feel like it has legs to last a long time?
The quick answer to all of the above: I just did a chokeslam to a dude off the top of a really high building and it was cool as hell. Rumbleverse might have the magic formula.
Battle Royale with wrestlers
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the premise of Rumbleverse. Wrestling, open-world, battle-royale. Let all of that sink in for a moment…
So, I’ve started out with a custom wrestler (limited options for clothing, at no cost, but hey-ho!) and gotten straight to work. There’s the option to do a bit of free-roaming and learning without being in a fight, but I’ve found that to be a little lacklustre. Now I’m brawling, over and over.
Rumbleverse is delivering that cartoonish style (Iron Galaxy have nailed their own aesthetic here!) which some may attribute to a similar style as Fortnite, but it works here to help the zany action. The map is a city, the moves and wrestlers are over-the-top and move fluidly as hell.
On paper, and in practice, I’m finding Rumbleverse to be fun. The short burst of action is interspersed with moments of calm. Climbing up a building to hide, recover and hopefully pounce on your next victim. Frenetic and calm, but always vibrant and full of life.
In terms of the classic battle royale gameplay, you’re picking up items to help improve your chances. Wrestling tropes like steel chairs and two-by-fours. Also, magazines to read and learn stronger moves as you work through the match. It’s fluid and never frustrating to pick something up and improve.
You can heal, by eating chicken (Rumbleverse’s chosen protein intake), you can recover stamina by picking up drinks, and you can up your health and stamina bars, too.
It’s truly a battle royale, but with a quirky twist, and it works wonderfully!
City living
As is often the way with a battle royale, you drop from the air, into a city. Rumbleverse fires you out of a cannon, and each match starts with the circle only covering a certain part of the city. This is clever because 40 people on the entire map would likely be slow-paced.
With the smaller circle to start, always getting smaller as a match progresses, your moments of quiet are short-lived, so you need to learn how to optimise your healing and recovery time. As cartoony and casual as Rumbleverse appears, there’s plenty of depth and strategy to be had here.
Have you got the right moves? Does one of your moves help with traversal, so you can get away if things are going south? Will you elbow drop that dude from the roof of a house or use that time to run away?
It’s encounter-led, as all battle royales are. But Rumbleverse has removed all the usual long and mid-range elements and got everyone going in with arms and legs. Uppercuts, chokeslams, slaps and chops. Thematically it hits the nail squarely on the head.
Best still, apart from a couple of short-lived network tests, Rumbleverse hasn’t had the luxury of being out for a while and having all of their servers thoroughly beaten into submission. Yet, Iron Galaxy has delivered a really smooth day one experience. I’ve had no matchmaking issues, no lag or connection issues. It’s been an absolute joy to play, smooth as butter. In 2022 that’s sadly still something that should be praised!
How long will it last?
It’s hard to say how well an audience will take to a game, and how big it may become. I’d put money on it being successful, though because it has its core theme nailed down, and the execution is fantastic.
Rumbleverse has been smooth playing from the get-go, and if this is the expected level of service to start with, imagine how much better it will grow to be!
With a battle pass coming next week, we’ll see if the cosmetic side of it will be enough to keep people coming back, but honestly. If you like to dip into a game for a few minutes here and there, so chaos, some fun and no massive time commitment, Rumbleverse may well be for you.
I love PUBG and Fortnite, but this is something similar and totally different. This is scratching some serious itches, and long may Rumbleverse continue!
I’ll be here for a while. Come fight me in Grapital city!
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