Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds Review

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG, is a part of a fairly new genre of games called battle Royale. One of the more popular games before PUBG was DayZ: Battle Royale, a mod from the ARMA 2 game. This was one of the first games to gain popularity with the battle royale genre. Player Unknown was the modder that had the vision of this game type, but it wasn’t the game he had hoped it to be. he moved on later to mod the H1Z1 series with the king of the kill mod. Player Unknown still wasn’t satisfied with the say the game was, and sometime later a Korean company, blue hole, invited him to work on their team to have his battle royale game idea more of the way he wanted it to be. In March of 2017 PUBG was released on PC as an early access title. It wasn’t hugely popular, but as more and more Youtubers and streamers played it and covered the content over the next 8 months or so PUBG soared to the top of steam charts and was the most streamed game on twitch.

The concept of PUBG is simple, the last person, or team, standing at the end of the round. Easier said than done in most cases though. Players can join a game alone, in duos or in a squad of up to 4 people to fight to get their chicken dinner. At the start of a round players start out in a C130 plane that flies over the one map currently available on xbox (2 are available on PC at the moment). The map never changes, the building and terrain is the also the same. But the items that spawn in the building around the map are all randomly generated. Loot from backpacks to high powered kar98 sniper rifles can spawn. Players skydive to anywhere on the map they wish and begin their looting, all the while keeping a watchful eye for other players. Some spots you land are very popular with other players where firefights start almost immediately, and others are much more quite where players have a bit of time to loot before engaging with other enemies.

Shortly after landing on the ground a timer and a white circle appear. the timer counts down the time player have before the storm, or blue circle, start to close in on the randomly generated white circle. once the blue circle (the storm) closes in players should be on the move to make it in the white circle, if a player catches themselves in the blue storm, they will take damage. The first few circles do negligible damage, but as the game progresses the blue storm will start to take a very noticeable chunk of life, so it’s best to try and avoid blue circle damage whenever possible.

All of these mechanics are in play while trying to make sure another team of players doesn’t ambush you and your squad and wipe you out. Once in a firefight if you lose all your health you are downed (but not out). You go into a downed state where you are able to crawl slowly, but unable to do any damage to enemies. Your teammates on your squad are able to receive you, but it takes 10 seconds to do so, time you may not have in an intense firefight. Once revived you only have ¼ to 1/3 of your health, so medical supplies are a necessity. You need to still play causally though, every time you are knocked down, the time available to be revived is shorter and shorter. on the 4th time you instantly die, with no time available to be pick back up.

The game is still on the Xbox preview program so it is no way a complete game yet, and as such it has its fair share of issues. People with a day one Xbox or a Xbox One S may have issues at the start of rounds with building models not loading properly, or quickly. Many a times my friends have ran into what they refer to as “play-doh” looking houses, only to have their player model fall through or get stuck in the floor after the building properly load. often once or twice a match 2 or 3 squad members will get a random force close of the PUBG program on the Xbox and have to reload into the game. This can take a minute to 3 minutes and when in a firefight, this often means loading into a dead character. This can be especially frustrating when you had just spent 15 to 20 minutes looting, only to get booting from the game and have enemies roll up on you and kill you non moving character. the graphics in the game are pretty incredible, epically for a console game, but these graphics can cause issues in other areas of the game Oftentimes there can be very bad framerate drops, especially in firefights or when driving quickly in a vehicle. PUBG is slated to run at a 30fps, but it has been known to drop to 15 or so FPS. Overall the game runs at around an average of 22 fps on the base Xbox and around 27fps on the Xbox One X. The FPS drop can be incredibly frustrating when engaging in fire fights, but as we have to remember this is still being optimized for the Xbox. Similar issues were present on the PC version when it first released in march of 2017, but most, if not almost all of them have been addressed and at the very least improved upon and/or fixed.

Bluehole and Microsoft did a pretty incredible job at the amount of controls they were able to fit onto a single Xbox controller. But with there being so many controls, it often leads to a bit of clunkiness. Every 3 or so games I had issues looting items at all or having issues doing anything in the player menu. Looting on the Xbox is a tad bit slower that the PC counterpart. Dropping or splitting stack of items, such as ammo can be a bit frustrating. And most of all swapping attachments off or to other guns can be incredibly challenging. It is possible, but it takes a significantly larger amount of time to do so as compared to the PC version of the game. Although these weird glitches are super frustrating, at times the randomness or the timing of some of these things can be comical. driving at full speed away from another squad of 4 all shooting at you and your teammate only to have your car launch and flip into the air and come down in a tree or in a river can be just as adrenaline pumping as is funny and frustrating.

Even in its current state or being unfinished and not 100% PUBG is a insanely fun game that will get your blood pumping and your heart pounding. I know the Developers will only make this game better and more optimized. If you absolutely cannot deal with the random glitches or the crashing of the game, I would definitely hold off and buy the game once it leave the Xbox preview program and officially releases as a finished game. But if you can handle the hiccups and bumps the game currently has, I would most definitely give this game a shot, and ad $30 USD, is cheaper than almost any game you can buy at the moment anyways. happy chicken dinner hunting, and my the odds be ever in your favor.

Game 2 Gamer’s Final Score: 4/5

Replay Value: High

Frustration Level: