PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Review

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Publisher: Bluehole, Inc. Developer: PUBG Studios Release: 2017 Platform: PC Players: 100 (Up to 4 per squad) Genre: Tactical First-or-Third Person Shooter Rating: 8.4 \ 10.0: Great

Above is a player delivering the final blow to a downed opponent.

Conceptually, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a simple game. Up to 100 players are put on a plane and dropped onto an island in order to gather weapons and equipment and fight until one person or team remains while a shrinking field of deadly energy continuously forces the survivors closer together.

This is far from an original concept -- it was heavily inspired by the movie Battle Royale and also borrows heavily from the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod and H1Z1: King of the Kill. The former was developed by Brendan Greene (PlayerUnknown himself) and he was involved in the early development phase of the latter. Battlegrounds adds some new features to this formula that have since been adapted by other battle royale games that were released at a later date. These include a plane from which players drop.

One of the game's strengths is its great weapon variety and gunplay. The weapons each have distinct stats and recoil patterns. There is a wide variety attachments that can found on the ground and equipped modify a weapon's handling including foregrips, quickdraw and extended magazines, and suppresors, and no weapon is able to equip every attachment. Some powerful guns and attachments can only be found in supply crates that occasionally are occasionally dropped by a plane onto the battlefield, and this creates interesting risk-reward scenarios in which you must weigh the potential quality of the crate's contents against the possibility that the red smoke cloud emitted from the box will attract opponents. Because the weapons not found only in crates are so well balanced (I am not implying that the crate weapons are unbalanced, but they are designed to be superior to the weapons found on the ground), I felt that the game's random loot system greatly raised what would have otherwise been a much lower skill ceiling by encouraging players to be able to make the best of the equipment they find. However, I will occasionally play matches in which I will land at an area that I have previously found great equipment at only to find that there were nothing but a few near-useless pistols and weak attachments, which can feel quite unfair.

While most of the weapons feel great to use, shotguns feel terrible. Even if your crosshair is perfectly overlapping with an enemy when you pull the trigger, they will often sidestep the shotgun pellets even at a range of only a few meters because of how slow they travel. The damage that these weapons deal is very inconsistent as well thanks to the ridiculous number of varying damage zones that players have. There are several different levels of damage that each gun can deal to just to a player's torso, and when facing players in the late stages in the game, you must also consider that they are very likely to have acquired body armor. This isn't very noticeable with most weapons, but with guns that shoot ten projectiles at once, it definitely is. Having different amounts of damage be dealt to the head, limbs, and torso would have been sufficiently realistic while also making the damage more consistent and making kills less random.

Where PUBG truly excels is in the late stages of a match. When the play area is incredibly small and only several players remain, I experience an sense of tension that I have not felt playing any other game. Other tactical shooters that I frequently play such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Rainbow Six: Siege frequently place me in nerve-wracking situations, but because rounds in those games are far shorter than PUBG games, the stakes are far lower. Once the force field shrinks the play area down to a small enough size, the possibility that an enemy is hiding in a nearby building or behind a rock becomes incredibly high, and situations in which an enemy and I knew each others' locations and waited to act made me especially paranoid. The final moments of a match usually occur 25 to 30 minutes after it began, and this buildup leads to high stakes final battles that rarely disappoint. There were several times that I was killed anticlimactically by the constricting force field or that  I won when the same happened to my opponent, but very few of the games that I have either won or come close to winning were not entertaining.

PUBG's most significant weakness is its lack of content. With a mere three maps, it somehow has triple the number of play areas as every other battle royale game I've played. Formulating strategies to suit every possible situation can take many hours, but after awhile the game begins to feel repetitive. Perhaps I would be more enticed to play if there was something to achieve other than victory (which you must accept will come infrequently if you hope to enjoy the game), but aside from collecting a handful of achievements, there isn't. You can use the Battle Points that you earn from playing to purchase crates that contain customization items for your character, but the chances of receiving duplicates that can be exchanged for a pitifully small amount of BP increases dramatically after acquiring several items. I eventually gave up opening crates knowing that I would get either a duplicate or a very common item and instead sold the boxes on the Steam market for pocket change. The combination of a lack of progression and the slight lack of control over my success in the game began to kill my desire to play. Even very fun games begin to get old when luck is involved.

Of the three aforementioned maps, two of them are quite fun to play, and one is certainly not. The original map, Erengel, has a wide variety of locations including apartment complexes, small cities, a prison, a military base, a quarry, ancient ruins, a power plant, and most notably a school that a ridiculous number of players land at as when the plane flies within two kilometers of it. Despite the map being a whopping 64 square kilometers, it has a great ratio of buildings to empty space. The island map, Sanhok also strikes this balance well, but lacks the variety of Erengel, as almost all of the loot-heavy areas are either groups of wooden huts or military boot camps; the primary exception is a resort located at the center of the map. This map is one quarter the size of Erengel and was meant to have much quicker matches than the other maps, but that is usually not the case. The matches are nearly the same length and the primary difference in how the map is played is that using vehicles is mostly pointless because running a safe distance away from the energy field is fairly easy and is far less likely to reveal your position to enemies, but this is only a nitpick. The desert map, Mirimar, however, is absolutely awful. The cities on the map are massive and are filled with five-story office complexes with countless windows that provide a ridiculous amount of cover and positioning opportunities for players occupying them. This makes crossing the street a  potentially fatal decision as you could be shot dead by someone peaking through a window on the top floor of a building from an angle that the they were invisible to you from. The empty areas in between cities are almost completely devoid of cover, meaning that anyone unlucky enough not to have found a car is an easy target for snipers lying prone at the top of distant hills. Positioning is far more important than your ability to aim in Mirimar, and if the energy field forms a circle which forces you to move up a hill late in the game, you're as good as dead if a player has already situated themselves at the top of it.

My final issue with this game is one, or more accurately several, is one that it has become infamous for: its technical issues. The game once had many small glitches that, even after the game was no longer labeled as Early Access, were common, but many of them have been fixed. The game's optimization, however, has consistently been unsatisfactory. Battleground's graphics are far from stellar -- I've seen PC games nearly from the late 2000s that at the very least look as impressive, but that doesn't detract from the game's quality. What is bothersome are the frequent framerate drops I experienced. For seemingly no reason the game's framerate would be reduced by half for several seconds which should not be possible with such mediocre visuals. I also have continued to experience more minor annoyances such as having healing animations interrupted when I was a car passenger even when the terrain was smooth.

Of all the battle royale games currently on the market, PUBG is my favorite, but it's not without its flaws. The gunplay is solid and the game can be loads of fun when played casually with friends, but the lack of map selection and a proper progression system as well as other issues prevent the game from being as excellent as it could be.

Ups
Fantastic gunplay
Maps (that aren't Mirimar) allow for a variety of strategies
Erengel has a great variety of locations
Randomization leads to interesting scenarios
Fantastic and tense endgame

Downs
Cannot search exclusively for Erengel matches
Mirimar is a terrible map
Kills can feel random due to damage zones
Shotguns are mostly useless
Occasional performance issues

Also available on Xbox One

The System Difference: Despite its numerous bugs and lack of content, PUBG is considered a complete game on PC. The Xbox One version, however, is still in its early access phase. The PC version's performance is already unsatisfactory, but this port will runs shockingly bad. The framerate is meant to stay locked at 30 FPS, but major drops are so frequent that it probably averages somewhere around 15 FPS. It is straight unplayable due to the framerate at times, and making matters worse is that buildings will sometimes lack collision and be rendered at the lowest level of detail for the first 90 seconds of a match. Even if this version didn't run horrendously (even on the powerful Xbox One X), I still would not recommend it, as this game has far too many inputs for a controller to properly handle which lead to actions that would take me less than ten seconds using a mouse, such a removing the attachments from one gun and transferring them to another, taking an annoyingly long time. Avoid this version of the game at all costs.

ESRB: T Content: Blood and Violence Price: $29.99 (Download)