It’s adorable as heck.
As a connoisseur of Fortnite and Fortnite related merchandise, I am constantly on the lookout for an innovative and fresh faced battle royale game. I may have found it in the form of Royal Crown, however the game needs some work. Obviously. It’s in early access.
Royal Crown is a top-down battle royale game with an art style that makes it look a bit like a MOBA title and some interesting crafting. The game itself is kind of weird in that you parachute down like you do in a normal game with the WASD keys but once you land it switches to a fixed camera where you move by right clicking on the ground with a mouse.
Royal Crown is very moba-ish and it can get frantic especially when you have multiple people on screen all fighting one another. Every character is their own class and comes with different powers that are leveled up as your character levels up. You gain levels by collecting resources, killing players, and just being alive as you slowly gain experience over the course of the match.
I think the big draw with Royal Crown is in its fast-paced action combat. The time to kill is more like a MOBA than a battle royale where you can get shot in the head and die instantly. You have more leeway and opportunity to move around, work your crowd control moves, and escape if you need to. A lot of the gameplay seems to be focused around ambushing and stunning as you also have to deal with line of sight and fog of war limiting what you can see at any time. If you are in a building facing the wall you are not going to see much.
One aspect that I did find interesting is the crafting system. You find health/mana potions in chests but you can also craft healing items and other weapons by collecting resources. The better healing items require you to plop down a big cauldron and stay there while you chow down whereas items like potions have interruptible timers and magic healing powder has a cooldown and generally heals less damage.
The folks at Meerkat Games have the right idea on the gameplay and combat, where the game is seriously lacking right now and why I’m going to wait a while before fully diving in is the server performance. While I didn’t have any problems in a match, the game suffers from terrible performance at the main screen. There is a battle pass for less than $10 but buying into it right now is a pointless endeavor since I never got any of my matches to actually count their progress.
Regardless if you’re looking for a cutesy isometric battle royale game, Royal Crown is free to play. I might give it some more time in the oven unless you really like playing work in progress titles.
MMO Fallout 