Can We Get A Battle Royale That’s Just Hyper Scape’s Ball Mod?

Balls out.

Hyper Scape

Battle Royales have never really been my forte. The most I’ve ever been involved with one was around the time Apex Legends launched, but that hype quickly faded after a lacklustre first season and the realisation that none of my regular gaming friends gave a crap about the game. It’s hard to play a team based battle royale when no one else is excited to play the game with you, or play the game in general.

Since then, the closest I’ve come to a Battle Royale obsession is Fall Guys, and even then I have to turn the game off after a couple of matches due to getting tilted. If it’s not Team Games like Fall Ball or Team Tail Tag, it’s the absolute animals that emerge when playing See Saw. These people are monsters.

However, I might have just found something that appeals to my need for shithousery, and that’s in Hyper Scape. Recently launched on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape is another 100 player battle royale that on the surface doesn’t do much to innovate the formula, but there’s a couple of key changes that keep the process somewhat interesting.

Hyper Scape

Firstly, the map shrinks in sectors instead of one giant circle, which changes how players are boxed in towards fighting each other. The map also accentuates verticality and close quarters combat above all else, with a cityscape that allows players to easily scale huge buildings, some of those buildings being fully explorable.

Lastly, the biggest change comes from how you can win the game. While eliminating all the other players remains a valid strategy, players who make it to the final sector will be able to try and grab a crown. Whoever holds onto the crown for 45 seconds is declared the victor, meaning players who aren’t necessarily good at fighting can try to hide and make a play for the crown at the end of the game. You can even win without killing anyone. Not that I’d know from experience though, I haven’t even seen the final circle yet. I just know it’s an achievement/trophy.

While these are decent changes to the formula, Hyper Scape still feels like it’s chasing the same dragon as Warzone and Apex Legends. The FPS Battle Royale genre is only becoming more crowded, and I have to wonder whether or not there’s room for another BR game, offering the same set of modes with another tier 100 battle pass. Still, Hyper Scape offers something no other BR title can, and that’s a giant bouncy ball mod that makes traversal ridiculously fun.

Players can find mods scattered around the map that offer plenty of useful abilities, most of them being traditionally helpful tools like a teleport, mines, healing stations and more. The ball mod, however, transforms you into a giant armoured bouncy ball that can scale tall buildings in a single bound, knock players around (without doing any damage) and just generally have a good old time.

I had more fun dicking around with this mod than I did with the actual combat. Whether that’s an indictment on the game itself, or a compliment on this one aspect, is up for debate. Still, getting involved in a gunfight with another player only to bounce away, cackling like a maniac as they pathetically try to shoot me out of the sky is a thrill that kept me entertained while playing. Okay, usually they do end up destroying the ball, forcing me to use my legs like some form of commoner, but for a few fleeting moments, I feel free.

There’s an indescribable joy that comes with just turning into a giant ball and hopping around the city, so much so that I feel like Hyper Scape’s developers should just abandon its current battle royale plans and create a mode where 100 players try to knock each other into killing zones or off a cliff with these massive spheres. Theoretically, it could be done right now, but there are too many spoilsports with actual weapons “playing the game properly”. How dare they.

Too many players can now lay claim to the title of being the best at shooting and hiding from people in a large map, regardless of the game that they’re playing on, but who among you can claim to be the King/Queen/Ruler of the Balls? That’s the achievement I want. It’d be new, exciting, or at least just something a little bit different than another battle royale shooter chasing the same trends, offering plenty of the same ideas that have been rehashed and appropriated across the genre (respawns, pinging, sprint slides and more besides).

Look, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I just want to play with balls, okay?

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