Features

Harry's hot takes: Battle royale games, mobile or not, are all absolute garbage

You know I'm right

Harry's hot takes: Battle royale games, mobile or not, are all absolute garbage
Harry's hot takes banner

You literally cannot move for battle royale games on the App Store and Google Play Store at the moment.

And no, I'm not speaking metaphorically or figuratively. If you're moving right now, it is an illusion willed into being by your brain.

It's not just PUBG or Fortnite, there are a whole multitude of clones and iterations too, and I simply refuse to take the time to head over to Google to find out their names.

Why do I refuse? It's easy - because all battle royale games are inherently without merit.

"Oh wise and merciful Harry," you're probably chanting right now, "share with us your hottest, most honest takes on this highly controversial subject."

To which I shall reply "Er, yeah go on then. But only because no one else is brave or righteous enough to do it."

Hot takes! COME FORTH! Show the people why battle royale games are stupid and rubbish.

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on
They have too many players

A hundred players? Every time I think about that number I reach for a beverage, just so I can spit out that beverage in disbelief and disgust. Every single decent human being knows the perfect number of people to play a multiplayer shooter. It is not 100. It is four.

Why is it four? Because that's how many people I used to play Goldeneye with. We didn't need an internet connection, we just needed the almost-perfect eyesight of youth to see what was going on in our corner of a 21 inch CRT screen.

Any more than four players and the game is just compensating for something. Battle royale games, for example, are compensating for being utterly repellent.

Islands are stupid

Quite frankly, there is no worse place to set anything than an island. They are the videogaming equivalent of a marge sandwich. Uninspiring, bland, and dirt cheap.

It's like admitting that your game isn't good enough to take place on something cool, because the cool thing would spit out all the players and leave them stranded in a digital limbo.

Cool places include: any setting in the game PowerStone; any setting in the game PowerStone 2; the underpass in Street Fighter IV where the fat kid falls over in shock when someone gets knocked out. That's it, everywhere else is awful. Especially islands.

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on
Battle royale games copied The Hunger Games

Everyone knows that the original battle royale happened in a series of films starring the second Mystique from the confusing Xmen prequels called The Hunger Games.

These films were then turned into books for people who get nauseous when looking at things happening on a screen. Especially if they're looking at a battle royale.

In this battle royale, confusing Mystique is told what to do by Woody from Cheers. And I think Thor's brother is in there too, involved somehow in the battle royale. I'm pretty sure the films invented the term battle royale. They definitely didn't exist in any comics of foreign films before that.

Anyone who disagrees with this history of the battle royale should be drugged, have a bomb attached to their neck, and be forced to kill their Japanese classmates in a subversively ironic battle to the death.

They're too popular

A lot of people like battle royale games, and you might consider using that as an argument against me. But here's the thing, I can refute your argument with five words. What are those words? Here they are - they made five Transformers movies.

To all intents and purposes, people are idiots who should not be allowed to choose their own forms of entertainment. Because when they do they pick festering piles of garbage. And they don't just pick the garbage once. They pick it every single time. Every. Single. Time.

If you ever find yourself playing a game, and a friend comes over and tells you they also enjoy that game, you should instantly throw that game into a bin. Because that is where popular things belong.

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on
What if you don't like chicken dinners?

Imagine the scene: an unwitting vegan plays a match of PUBG. They win, only to be rewarded a chicken dinner. The other vegans find out and beat their former ally to death with kale. Kale being a sufficient weapon because of the weak, protein-depleted bones of the vegan.

If the game said Winner Winner, have a nice bowl of couscous, then I might be able to get behind it. Instead it's the opposite of inclusive.

In fact, PUBG might just be a threat to the existence of vegans and vegetarians the world over. Playing is a tacit backing of genocide, you absolute monsters.

The names are stupid

It took me ages to work out which way round the letters in PUBG go. I still get it wrong. And I'm not going to type out the full name because who on Earth has time to do anything like that?

Fortnite is also a stupid name. And all the other names are, I imagine, equally stupid. If something has a stupid name, you should hit it with a spade until it is dead. That should be the law. I'm not even close to joking. A spade.

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.