The best battle royale games

Respawn Entertainment may have shelved development on Titanfall 3, but the studio avoided angering most of its fans by releasing the free-to-play Apex Legends in its place. Set in the Titanfall universe, the battle royale game is, on a fundamental level, similar to its peers. You still drop down onto a map and gather weapons and gear from loot boxes, and a circle gradually shrinks to kill those not active in the fight. However, it also introduced respawning to the formula, allowing teams to revive their friends killed earlier in a match. This small change wouldn’t be enough to cause Apex Legends’ massive success, however — Respawn’s excellent gunplay is responsible for that. Smooth, snappy, but still weighty, the weapons in Apex Legends feel nearly perfect, and they make it easy to sink dozens of hours into the game in a single week. With classes offering their own unique abilities, as well, you can always try a new strategy.

You wouldn’t think there’d be room for yet another battle royale shooter, but Call of Duty: Warzone somehow manages to capture the attention of millions of players — even in such a saturated market. The Call of Duty name alone prints money for Activision, and with it being free to play, it’s an enticing offer. There’s nothing quite like how a Call of Duty game feels — something that other shooters have tried and failed to replicate. Combined with the massive budget of an Activision game and a high degree of polish, Warzone refines the genre completely. It borrows many beloved mechanics from the base version of 2019’s Modern Warfare, like perks and weapon progression, and successfully melds it with what you’d expect from a battle royale game. It features 150 players across small teams of up to four players — all competing to gather cash, loot, and XP while avoiding the deadly gas that slowly closes in on you. And with constant updates courtesy of Raven Software, Warzone has been evolving alongside the mainline titles.

The game that served as the catalyst for the battle royale phenomenon, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has nonetheless avoided very many pure imitators. A remarkably slow game in comparison to its competitors, a typical match of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds involves players sneaking into shacks and houses, finding a weapon or two, and carefully crawling through the grass to avoid detection. Chaos can still break out at any moment, with grenades going off as players scramble for cover. It isn’t a game of excess, but it rewards smart play like few other battle royale titles. Despite making full use of controllers on console and mouse-and-keyboard on PC, the game was even translated to phones and tablets as the excellent PUBG Mobile. Free-to-play, the mobile version’s use of motion aiming helps to keep your shots precise, and it has even received in-game tie-ins with franchises like Mission: Impossible and Resident Evil. It doesn’t have the same fidelity as its big sibling, but that’s about the only tradeoff you’ll deal with.