The battle royale category is quickly becoming saturated with great games, but that hasn’t deterred Ubisoft from joining the fray. Hyper Scape is the latest take on the genre and, even though it’s still a beta, shows a lot of potential. Here’s everything we know about Ubisoft’s recently released battle royale game, Hyper Scape.
Further reading
The basics of Hyper Scape
Set on Earth in the year 2054, Hyper Scape has a world full of lore that is begging to be discovered. A fictional company, B-Link, is at the heart of the narrative, and they have created a new piece of technology that allows people to jump into a virtual world, known as the Hyper Scape. All of the playable characters have a unique reason for being there, and it’s up to the players to slowly figure out what that is.
Hyper Scape is developed and published by Ubisoft. In fact, the team behind Hyper Scape is the same team that worked on Rainbow Six Siege. That alone is enough to garner a fair bit of interest, as Siege continues to be of the most played competitive shooters on the market. The game is currently only available on PC (in beta form) but will be coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sometime this summer.
The game will launch as a free-to-play title, will include crossplay, and profiles can be seamlessly transferred from one console to the next. This means you can play a few matches on your PlayStation 4 in the morning, then log in to the same profile on your laptop later in the day. The game will be monetized using a battle pass system and various cosmetic microtransactions.
Hyper Scape gameplay
Right now, Hyper Scape offers 12 playable characters, 11 weapons, two game modes, and one map. The two game modes (Crown Rush) are both battle royales — one is composed of 33 squads of three players while the other is for solo players. There’s also a variation on Squads currently available that changes the availability of certain items.
Neo Arcadia, the only playable map, can hold up to 100 characters per match and consists of a wide variety of locations. It offers plenty of indoor spaces for tense shootouts, towering skyscrapers for verticality, and wide-open courtyards for those looking to do a bit of sniping.
Beyond weapons, players will also need to utilize Hacks in order to win a round of Hyper Scape. Hacks are essentially unique skills or abilities that can change the flow of combat. Nine Hacks are currently available, with more planned for release in the future. Some of these Hacks grant players the ability to heal nearby allies, teleport to a new location, or ping the location of enemies in your proximity.
Unique features
One of the cool things about Hyper Scape is that players who are eliminated are still able to help out their teammates. Instead of becoming a spectator or being sent to a gulag, players who are knocked out become an Echo. In this form, they can still observe the battlefield and relay info back to their team. They can’t take part in combat, but they can be the eyes in the sky for their surviving crew.
Eliminated players can also return to action if their team eliminates an enemy squad. This will force a respawn point to show up on the map, from which the dead player can be revived.
The typical battle royale ring is also missing from Hyper Scape. Instead, entire sectors will become grayed out as the match progresses. This happens in a semi-random pattern, meaning closed sectors aren’t evenly distributed across the map, and it does a great job of creating choke points that can lead to wild firefights.
There’s also a new twist that takes place at the end of each round, called the Showdown Phase. During this phase of the match, a crown will spawn at a location inside the final arena. Players can eliminate all other enemies to win the round, or they can snag the crown and try to survive for 45 seconds.
Thanks to a mechanic known as fusing, Hyper Scape gives players a good reason to keep searching the map before the Showdown Phase begins. This mechanic allows players to continually upgrade their weapons as they stumble upon other versions of it. Instead of adding individual components to your weapon, like Apex Legends, or simply hoping to find a stronger version of it, like Fortnite, Hyper Scape rewards players for any level of weapon they come across. This keeps the matches lively, as squads are incentivized to keep moving across the world as they incrementally level up their weapons.
Future plans
As a beta, the game has a lot of new content that will be introduced to Hyper Scape in the coming months. New Hacks, weapons, and game modes are all possibilities. The game has featured prominently on Twitch, so we have to imagine some unique integration will be happening in the future. For now, viewers can cast votes using a system known as Crowncast, allowing them to impact events that happen in the match they are viewing.
These can be as minor as giving players additional health, or as drastic as pinging all player locations. It’s a fun way to blur the streamer/viewer boundary, and we are excited to watch it develop over the next few months.
We’re also curious to see how Ubisoft fleshes out the narrative of Hyper Scape. As it stands, a lot of questions are raised by the virtual world created by B-Link, and it’ll be interesting to see how these are answered as new updates are rolled out.
How to play Hyper Scape
For now, Ubisoft’s battle royale is limited to the Uplay Launcher. Interested gamers will need to create a free Uplay account to download the client and install the game. The title will eventually release on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Marketplace, but we’ve yet to receive word on an official launch date.
There’s also no word on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X version, but we’d be shocked if the game didn’t make the next-gen leap. Ubisoft’s other popular shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, is confirmed for future consoles, and it seems logical the company would do the same for Hyper Scape.
