Enter Ring Of Elysium into the arena of Battle Royale: which, contrary to the game’s concept of a shrinking Battle Arena, is now a genre so overused that I’m finally beginning to resent it. It appears as though Tencent (the developers) have exhausted all their Battle Royale creativity on PUBG and decided that “Alright team, let’s now let’s experiment with a graphically downgraded version with a design improvement of a (pointless) paragliding option, that our nemesis Fortnite has already done”.
Ring of Elysium made me spend 10 minutes detailing the minute features of my character’s face. I could adjust the angle of the inner corner of my character’s eye, the expression of the eyebrows, and the length of the jawline. 10 minutes is how long I spent on deciding how she looked.
However, in my first game I was knocked out in lesser than 10 minutes, and also didn’t get to see my character’s face at any point. Although the subsequent games were a little better, I didn’t see my character’s face ever again… RIP, carefully sculpted face. I hope my opponents got to see its quality.
I have some seemingly silly but important questions for Ring of Elysium. First: why is it called a Ring, but the actual shape of the shrinking battle arena misshapen like an amoeba? Why? This asymmetry is baffling… Also, if Volcanic ash is the cause of a shrinking forcefield, why would the ash proliferate in such a way that it leaves an amoeba shaped emptiness in the centre?
Besides the fun facts mentioned in the above sentences, there is nothing fundamentally different between this fake Elysium and PUBG. They’ve even used weapons with the same kind of ammo. I found a Groza on the ground, which made me feel quite lucky, but the average range of in-game weapons seemed to be a notch above the ones in PUBG, so my lucky moment didn’t seem all that advantageous in the end. Bottomline is, we all should hold on to that reserved 2GB on our phones for PUBG — the one true battle royale, till the inevitable ban is initiated.