The battle royale genre is a packed and intensely competitive field. With a ton of options, many of them free-to-play, it's easy for players to hop from game to game, looking for exactly the right PvP scene. Sci-fi, fantasy, comics, and modern military combat are just a few of the things that have inspired these creative titles.
Inspired by wrestling and featuring a brand of high-flying cartoon action almost unheard of in the genre, Rumbleverse immediately distinguished itself from its competitors. For every battle royale trope the game uses, there's another that it turns its back on in pursuit of another kind of fun. All this has made for a unique and often hilarious BR experience. Here are some of the biggest things that Rumbleverse does differently than other battle royale games.
6 Character Customization
Battle royale games are almost synonymous with cool, rare, and expensive skins. Customization is at the top of many gamers' wishlists when it comes to in-game content, letting them be exactly the person they want to be as they explore new and exciting worlds. In BRs, customization comes with an extra layer of satisfaction, since the player knows their chosen face will be the last thing the enemy sees before they're eliminated.
Rumbleverse makes character customization a top priority, allowing players to swap cosmetics in no less than 14 different item slots, allowing them to create exactly the look that they want. Even games that include a huge number of selectable skins often permit very little customization, making one character look almost exactly like every other iteration of that character. In Rumbleverse, even if players share a cosmetic or two, it's all but guaranteed they'll be distinct from one another, carving a unique legacy on the battlefield.
5 Cartoony Aesthetics
Players have radically different tastes when it comes to graphics. Some want the highest level of realism possible, tasking the best and brightest graphics cards with the formidable task of simulating a world that looks and feels much like the real one. Others want games that look artistic, cartoony, minimalistic, or even abstract. There's no right answer, just personal taste.
Rumbleverse leans heavily into cartoonishness, looking like a show that many viewers might have watched as kids early on a Saturday morning. While this may not seem like a significant departure, since other BRs (most famously Fortnite) have adopted a cartoony aesthetic, it is one. Rumbleverse lets its aesthetic infuse every aspect of the game. It doesn't just look like a cartoon; it feels like one, with goofy antics and combat to match. This isn't a scaled-back mil-sim with a colorful skin; it's a genuine cartoon brawl fest.
4 Fighting Mechanics
Rumbleverse is not a fighting game. It's important to lead with that caveat, because "fighting game" is a phrase that intimidates many players, evoking thoughts of endless combo strings and counter mechanics that feel impossible to learn, let alone master. Rumbleverse is a battle royale about fighting--albeit cartoon fights between cartoon characters, complete with mid-air dodges and skyscraper elbow drops--with none of the usual fighting game baggage.
Rumbleverse does away with the endless string of guns found in other BRs and replaces them with a simple but satisfying melee system, taking inspiration from fighting and wrestling games without feeling overly complicated. Blows feel impactful and, most importantly, fun, and the player doesn't need to study combos late into the night to come out ahead.
3 Verticality
Map composition in battle royale games is tricky. It's hard enough to design a map suitable for one player, let alone a map big, complex, and balanced upon to be fun for 100 players. Terrain that vertically as well as horizontally is even tougher to balance and make fun, which is one reason that many battle royales end up taking place on mostly flat worlds.
Once in a while, a battle royale comes along that takes a real swing at verticality. Rumbleverse isn't the first in the genre to take a swing at a smaller, denser city map in which scaling buildings is as viable as running around at street level, but the unique wrestling aesthetic and melee mechanics let encounters play out much differently in this verticle environment than they do in other BRs.
2 Melee
Most BR games begin with a frantic dash to grab the best guns, bows, grenades, and other long-range weapons to take down opponents and ultimately claim victory. While games like Naraka: Bladepoint have proved that a melee-focused battle royale can work, few titles have embraced melee combat as wholeheartedly or well as Rumbleverse.
Wrestling is more than just an aesthetic in Rumbleverse: it's the heart and soul of its combat mechanics. Throws, grapples, flying elbows, and other wrestling staples are an integral part of the battle, making sure that fights stay up close and personal while avoiding moves that feel too cheap. Other battle royale games sometimes feel impersonal, with characters getting killed by an unseen sniper halfway across the map. The player might still lose in Rumbleverse, but at least they'll have a chance to trade blows before it happens.
1 Inclusivity
It's no secret that some games are easier to get into than others. While the average battle royale game may be easier to learn and excel at than the average fighting game, that's not to say that all of them are. Indeed, some BRs have made the difficulty of learning their mechanics part of the appeal, weeding out all but the most hardcore player and cultivating a top-tier but cutthroat competitive scene.
Rumbleverse has gone to lengths to offer players an alternative, making inclusivity one of its hallmarks. From the character customization process that allows players to better represent themselves in-game to the pick-up-and-play mechanics to the cartoony aesthetic of its locations and characters that distances itself from the self-serious aggression and snobbery of some other titles, Rumbleverse is a space for all. It just also happens to be a place for great suplexes.
Rumbleverse is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Series X/S.