Rumbleverse is an interesting idea for a battle royale, as it asks the bold question "What if Fortnite but wrestling?"... okay but seriously tho, I know Fortnite is popular but you don't need to recreate their UI/Interface 1 to 1. To its credit however, I do think the core gameplay is decent and the goofy wrestling theme is initially charming, but there is FAR too much going on here and the whole thing quickly unravels once you realize how convoluted, unbalanced, and overly complex it actually is. What should be a relatively simple brawler just turns into a straight up fighting game with seemingly endless lists of tactics, secret combos, and attack priorities. This might not be that bad, if the game wasn't one of the most inconsistent multiplayer game I've played. And after about 15 hours with it, I still cannot tell you with any certainty how a lot of the minutia actually works. Sometimes your unblockable attack will lock-on teleport you across the street to grab someone, and sometimes you can literally go through them but it doesn't give it to you. Sometimes you can punish another player for missing their unblockable and sometimes they can immediately dodge out of it. Most of the time getting knocked on the ground makes you invincible for a few seconds, yet other times you can get hit right away and will be combo'd into oblivion. Are these inconsistencies genuine mechanics I need to learn? Is the game just not very well designed? Or is it simply shitty netcode? Fuck if I know. There's just too much shit going on, and I think the game would benefit from being a lot more simplified.

And on top of that the game has by far the dumbest perk system I've ever seen where you randomly get perks once you deal enough damage. But there's no way to determine which perks you get, and they range from medicore things like "Throwables deal 20% more damage" to completely broken shit like "LUL LITERALLY FUCKING HEAL BY DEALING DAMAGE" or "HEAL BY STANDING STILL". That fact that you can get perks that broken AT RANDOM is insane, and its no surprise that 95% of games are won by people with one of the free healing perks.

IDK. I initially had some fun with it, but then it really started to piss me off once I realized how much of a mess it was. And as a free-to-play multiplayer game, having so much convoluted shit going on feels like the opposite thing you want, especially since the game does a horrific job at teaching you anything. It's definitely salvageable, but at its current state, I'd recommend staying away. At least until they just get rid of that dogshit perk system lmao.

20 players fighting on a relatively small map for 10 minutes is a pretty underwhelming "Battle Royale".

Overall, Rumbleverse is kind of fun even though some of the mechanics aren't very easy to figure out. I found myself using a move on another player, then sort of just bouncing off of them when they weren't blocking and I'd wonder if I did something wrong, if it was a latency thing, or if the game was just busted.

It just doesn't really do a good job of communicating when you can use abilities, what moves have priority, how you recover, why you're stunned, etc. etc. A lot of those could be solved by just having a better UI and competent tutorial.
The current tutorial is just "Hey, explore the entire map and we've hidden some TVs around that loosely explain mechanics". Bad

Visually, the game leaves a lot to be desired. The styling is a bit rough and the UI is horrible.

This is also yet another free-to-play game from devs that seemingly have never played another F2P game before. It seems silly but Fortnite is one of the most profitable games for a reason. Their skins in Fortnite are all pretty fairly priced... especially in contrast to Rumbleverse which is charging $22 for pretty bad quality skins and $7 for a plain hair style. Wild

I'll give the game one thing - getting to the final circle and winning the hectic battle is pretty fun. Even if this "Battle Royale" only fills the lobby with 20 people.

+ Kind of fun
+ Satisfying to win a match

- Terrible UI
- Unclear combat mechanics and move priority
- Bad stun-locking issue
- Extremely overpriced skins
- Bad tutorial

continues to copy respawn's homework and is better for it. after stealing most every movement mechanic from apex (aside from the broken stuff like wallbounces) they've moved onto swiping evo shields (evocrhome is technically last season) and supply bots. i do appreciate that every big update to fortnite keeps adding to the movement systems to the point where you can basically just consider it an arena shooter with one really big map. every change is well considered but the whole experience (at least in terms of gameplay) is just slightly too polished off to give us some really good exploits that really bust the whole thing wide open. there are enough systems at play on their own and getting around is smooth enough that i'm never truly bored in the transit times but the best Gaming Locomotion is always unintended by the developers.
they tightened up the graphics on level three. i didn't think it would be that noticeable but i moved from pc to console just to get all the fancy new bells and whistles. it is really really nice to look at. i truly loathe temporal artifacting, every time i see ghosting outlines of my character or the level geometry i feel like someone is dragging my brain across pavement. but there's something incredibly charming about the artifacts coming out of these early ray tracing engines. it feels so raw and grainy and weirdly analog. like you're seeing every little photon of light dotting your character whenever you're under the shadow of a tree. i imagine how i feel about this is similar to how most people get nostalgic for affine texture warping in old ps1 games. it's more genuine then temporal ghosting in my eyes. i think this is gamer brain damage really kicking in at age 26.

What the fuck. Fortnite is actually...really fun???

I hadn't played Fortnite since 2017. So I was really quite surprised with how polished and instantly fun to play it was. I was playing with gyro aiming on PS5 and I also felt like that increased my enjoyment. The controls were really fluid and responsive. Loved the shooting mechanics.

I really enjoyed just how much variety in involved in the map design. I also really liked how some items would considerably alter gameplay. Stuff like grapples or a drink that turns you into a blob. Really cool and imaginative stuff.

This was just such a blast to play with friends. I also played this mostly after playing a bit of Overwatch 2 and it's incredibly how much better the monetization in Fortnite is, in comparison. Night and day. I spent a few vBucks on silly dances and skins but I never felt ripped off. So there's that. I know microtransactions are bad as a rule, but they didn't overtly bother me for this.

Played 30 hours over the course of this season - Completed the basic BattlePass and unlocked SpiderGwen