Minecraft Battle Minigame
With the successes of Fortnite and PUBG in the last few months, one has to wonder about any previous battle royale games that came before this sudden genre popularity that just couldn’t hold players’ attention the way these new games can.
First off, a classic and favorite for its other modes, Minecraft’s modding community (especially on PC) has made likely hundreds of different arena modes where players can battle online against each other in custom built worlds. All the right pieces are there for Minecraft to have an awesome battle royale mode, crafting, procedurally generated biomes, weapons, environmental survival gameplay, mobs, online functionality, the list goes on. However, because an official battle royale mode has yet to come form Mojang, and the modding community and their own creations just don’t make the cut for mass popularity.
It’s hard enough creating a mod that enough people will find interesting enough to download, but to have one singular mod focused on battle royale gameplay to reach the height of popular PlayerUnknown’s own mod of DayZ had is a lot to ask.
In 2016, Minecraft released a Battle Minigame for the console versions of the game, wherein you are dropped into several official maps, some free and some you can purchase, where you collect items to fight other players to be the last one standing. Essentially it’s a small battle royale mode given to console players who are less likely to be able to mod their versions of Minecraft to try out other fan-made battle royale servers.
The Culling
The Culling is much more like The Hunger Games when it comes to battle royale games, as guns can be scarce with bullets even scarcer, meaning a lot of the fighting is done in close-quarters with brutal combat.
On two maps including a remote jungle and a former prison facility, up to 16 players fight either solo or in teams of two for around 20 minutes where you find items and weapons and create traps to kill enemy players. There are currently 32 melee weapons, and a few ranged weapons including bows and firearms.
The Culling released in October 2017, and currently has pretty mixed reviews on Steam. There are quite a few critiques on the game’s longer wait times for game queues, clunky gameplay, and the fanbase had died rapidly since it was announced a few months ago in late 2017 there will be no further updates on the Xbox One or PC versions.
While The Culling was popular before the release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, their success has overshadowed The Culling to the point that few people have still stuck around to play it compared to its glory days in 2017.
Last Man Standing
Last Man Standing is a free-to-play battle royale game from Free Reign Entertainment where, as the name suggests, you attempt to be the last man standing in a 100-player, multiplayer arena battle to the death.
With 30 weapons available, you can customize them to suit your play style with over a dozen weapon attachments. Supply drops also occur during matches so you can try and get the very best gear, but you’ll have to risk it as other players will likely be wanting the goods from supply drops as well.
It’s still a fun game with decent graphics, but due to the fact that it is solely free-to-play, Last Man Standing just doesn’t have as much finesse to match the other top battle royale games in the genre. It’s known to be pretty glitchy at times, and with better options out there now, it’s not getting as much attention as when it originally launched in mid-2017. Fortnite is currently free in early access, so there’s even less of a chance someone might pick up Last Man Standing with more popular and acclaimed battle royale titles available.
ARK: Survival of the Fittest
ARK: Survival of the Fittest originally started out as a mod for main game ARK, but then released as a standalone free-to-play add-on where 72 players fight in an arena with 30 plus creatures to fight or tame from dinosaurs to dragons. You can go in solo or in teams of six in groups the game refers to as tribes.
It was quite popular when it was first released, but is now considered to be a ‘dead’ game wherein very few players are online playing it anymore. It was changed from free-to-play in Summer 2016 and ‘re-integrated’ back into the main game Survival Evolved, which likely alienated some of the fanbase who were used to it being a free feature.
Studio Wildcard’s co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz even stated in an interview with PC Gamer that Survival of the Fittest was more of an experiment for the studio, saying, “It was an experiment that didn’t catch on but we do think there’s a fun game there. We’ve debated many times why it didn’t quite hit the sweet spot…”
GTA Online: Motor Wars
You can do almost anything in GTA V Online, and one of those things is fight in a demolition derby with specialty vehicles ripe with armor and mounted guns.
Landing in the shrinking game map, you and your team will quickly try and find a vehicle that are scattered about in order to face off with other teams all driving crazily around San Andres. This Motor Wars game mode was added as part of the Smuggler’s Run update in August 2017 and is still available today.
While this mode takes a fun, demolition derby style approach to battle royale, it never gained much popularity besides those who picked it up as an adversary mode while playing around online with every other mode imaginable. With a battle royale, car-focused game set in the polished world of GTA V, there is a lot of potential. However, it just didn’t get the type of popularity titles like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have now, despite there still being a lot of people who play on GTA V Online since it was released back in 2013.
Published: Mar 23, 2018 11:16 am