Early Access Review

Realm Royale

Summary

This has to be the saddest I have ever been writing a review, because I truly enjoyed this game (emphasis on the past tense).took the battle royale formula of limit combat, loot, and survive; and flipped it on its head. Through the chicken trophy and forge mechanics,encouraged playing aggressively in order to obtain and craft the best possible weapons, armor, and abilities. The different classes allowed the player to switch up his or her play style from game to game to keep each match from feeling stale. The TTK (time to kill) was in a great place and only required a few class and weapon tweaks to make the game feel even better. Sadly, this is where the praise for the game stops, and the self-destructive pattern of the developers begin.Prior to this week’s patch, the vast majority of the community would agree that as far as classes go, Assassin and Engineer were a little strong; and for weapon balance, the Slug Rifle and the Burst Rifle needed some changes...and that is pretty much it. Instead, Heroic Leap Games decided to: alter headshot damage multiplier, change starting armor value, change the weapon damage difference between common/rare/epic/legendary variations of weapons, remove chicken trophies from the game (required to forge legendary and class weapons), remove the shard (currency) bonus for getting kills, add legendary weapons/armor/abilities to chests found throughout the game (previously only obtainable via the forge), increased the chicken speed (downed state) by 45% making it 35% faster than a running player, decreased the player re-spawn time from 30 seconds to only 20 seconds, and more.Not all of these changes are bad, but changing so much makes it almost impossible to determine what few things were “out of balance”. Even worse, why change the core gameplay mechanics: chicken trophies and forging legendary gear. My only thought is to cater toward a more casual loot and camp playstyle like every other battle royale game on the market.players enjoyed the gameplay loop of finding and killing players, collecting shards, and forging the best possible gear; not relying on RNG from opening chests and completely eliminating any and all benefits of getting involved in engagements. But by far the worst part of this patch is that they already tried removing the chicken trophies and having legendaries drop from chests, and the community was in such an outrage that they quickly reverted the change after just one weekend. Heroic Leap Games were given a pass for these changes under the logic, “trying different things is what Alphas are for”. Prior to the release of the current patch from the PTS to the live server, they encouraged feedback on the official steam forum, where they were bombarded by fans begging not to remove chicken trophies or add legendary items to chests. On stream, a dev then announced that they would delay the patch as they have, “heard your feedback and are making adjustments”, but then proceeded to release the patch as is.