Publisher: Tencent, Garena
Developer: Tencent Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Survival Shooter

Tencent and Bluehole has benefited a lot from the Battle Royale series thanks to their billion-dollar game: Playerunknown's Battleground. Even though at the moment, the titular title has been receiving lot of flack for terrible business practices in Steam and poor optimizations within the Xbox One port. The mobile port of the game has 5 times the playerbase from both ports and is making quite a killing.

But Tencent as relentless as they are, worked with their in-house studios to make Europa(or now as called Ring of Elysium). A somewhat PUBG clone with different skin and few modifications which is free-to-play, one key difference is you explore the ring in extreme-winter sports fashion.

Gameplay

Ring of Elysium starts you in an arena without dropping you off. Instead you choose which location you'll spawn. You can even see where other players are also positioned, adding more tension and putting you at risk unless you're quick to gather items and have yourself sorted.

The map is in a town somewhere near the icy cold mountains, to survive you have to reach safe areas of the map but not because outside of safe zone you lose health, no that'll be because of the upcoming blizzard storms like Ymir and such. If you stay in prolong time within the storm, the temperature further increases and your health will drop faster.

Basic aspects of gameplay is similar, like PUBG but pretty different. You scavenge for items and you pick them up, manage inventory, weapons placements, which armor you should wear etc. Except you can by option enable and disable some of the weapon add-ons like scopes, lens or grips. The most interesting ways of playing the game comes after you've selected from three different gear types: Gliding, Skiing and Climbing.

Though it doesn't always seem like the best use case when it comes to flanking or surprise attacking opponents, these gears often help traverse the map through rougher terrains. Though the glides have been very useful attacking anyone from behind once you arrive from higher point.

Also about outfits, they are only for cosmetic reasons. Different outfits doesn't affect your character from temperature drops. I understood this was done for balancing reasons otherwise would have been a bit cool to check it out. The game also doesn't have backpacks as you manage your inventory with slots provided from the start.

Driving still has the same terrible collision affects as PUBG does, to be honest. The driving has always felt similar to Stalker for me with the latter, same with this title as well.

So everything checks out, shooting other players online feels nice. Though the game suffers from mouse issues, at seldom times. Your sensor will miss the rotations but not because of your hardware. Aiming is also difficult in first person though this is well compensated when you hold the right button for third person aiming. Another issue I've had is the automatic cover system, you lean on walls or trees and once that's so it is difficult to adjust your position. You can't even tell if your open for being targeted or not.

As you fight each other till the last man standing, the main objective however is for 4 players to reach the helicopter in time before the blizzard kills everyone. Now that sounds like it came straight from a movie.

RoE plays like your average Battle Royale game with couple of neat twists here and there, but execution wise it's not perfect yet. There's still room for improvement especially around the X-games part. Plus there's just only one map, but hey not much to ask for a F2P right?

Graphics/Technical

The visuals in RoE is ok, the engine has likeness of Unreal Engine 4 but it's not the same. Quicksilver X engine is used for real-time rendering. Making the game look astonishing when it comes to visual fidelity without consuming too much graphical resources. Though I would suggest installing this game in an SSD for better loading times and less stuttering.

Character models especially when you go to character creator at the beginning has so much going on from iris to facial. Even though they look Asian as heck.

But alas, this game isn't impervious to bugs, glitches and frame rate stuttering. It's not a perfect game and you will occasionally stumble.

Online

The game's DRM is from Steam, though launching this title takes its time to get to menu even though servers are really close to Dhaka in Bangladesh where I reside.

Unfortunately this game doesn't seem to have any interest in going worldwide as there's only two servers: NA and Asia. Europe is out of luck. Also god forbid if your network disconnects for 10 seconds, you'll have this disconnect notification stuck when you reconnect and getting rid of it requires you to restart your game client. Agonizing.

Servers aren't stable either, I've faced multiple lags especially in intense firefights. Not always the case, but when it happens, it's hampers the fun big time.

As for game modes, you have only: Solo, Duo, Squad for one mode only. No bots or custom servers as of yet, though this game was recently released and it beckons to be asked as to why they haven't released these modes yet?

Summation

Ring of Elysium still has long road ahead of itself, I mean it is free to play but this is a Tencent game and it is loaded with microtransactions. It feels like one of those you could play hours to no end with your friends but once you've figured what it exactly is, you move on elsewhere. Mostly because it sold itself as a concept. I do hope however it improves some of its signature mechanics with the whole extreme sports thing.

For now, the value of this game is only determined by how much time you're willing to give. As for me, here's my score.

7.5/10