Receive free Gaming updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Gaming news every morning.
When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was released last year, players were promised “graphical innovations that elevate the franchise to new heights”. In 2021, Far Cry 6 offered “stunning vistas” on its fictional Caribbean island of Yara, while near-future Battlefield 2042 boasted of “dynamic weather and spectacular world events”.
At a time when most first-person shooters are pushing for ever-more realistic visuals, though, one title stares in the face of graphical innovations and laughs. As you take your first, bullet-strafed steps through BattleBit Remastered’s 254-player maps, it quickly becomes clear why the game’s download weighs in at only 2GB compared to Modern Warfare II’s 125GB. The developers describe its cartoony, bare-bones aesthetic as “exhaustively optimised”, which is a polite way of saying that you’ll rarely find yourself stopping to admire the scenery.
As modern shooters buckle under the strain of their bells and whistles, it’s an ingenious approach, one that has allowed its development team of just three to focus on the gameplay. It has also immediately resonated with players: following its release into early access, the game quickly reached the top of Steam’s bestseller list, no doubt in part thanks to a very competitive £12.79 price tag.
What you don’t get for that price includes plot (there is none, it’s team America versus team Russia because why not?) or much polish (menus are utilitarian, music practically non-existent). The plus side is that the resulting combat is snappy and precise, buildings are destructible and vehicles and weapons are in high supply.
The chaotic gameplay that ensues isn’t so much dicing with death as defined by it. The map design, inclined as it is towards meat-grinder choke points and objectives, pushes players towards a high turnover. The game itself acknowledges this with the hot-mic mechanism, through which you briefly hear anything nearby players are saying on their microphones after you die. This oscillates wildly between hilarious and disturbing, depending on the age and sobriety of your opponents.
The grind required to get past the charnel-house stage does leave BattleBit with a bit of an existential problem, however. For example, there’s little to encourage you to resupply your teammates with ammunition when you know you’ll restock automatically as soon as you respawn. Also, neat attention to detail, such as having to combine leftover bullets in your magazines manually, feels superfluous because, again, you’ll usually be dead long before it matters. While the maps are vast, the frequent running between objectives after all those respawns can start to feel like a marathon.
All of which makes for an experience that is intensely entertaining in short bursts but a little hollow in the long run. Perhaps the visuals aren’t the key factor, rather it is BattleBit’s originality and sense of humour that have disrupted its competitors so effectively. As a proof of concept — one showing that three people can capture the hearts of gamers in a way that takes most studios hundreds — it is a much-needed jolt for the genre.
★★★☆☆
‘BattleBit Remastered’ is available now in early access on PC