Realm Royale

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Players: 99 Competitive (Online), 99 Team Competitive (Online)

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Review:

(Note: This game was re-released as Realm Royale Reforged. The following review is for the original release of the game)

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS AND LOOTBOXES

Realm Royale is a free-to-play Third-Person Shooter set in the same world as developer Hi-Rez studio’s other free-to-play shooter, Paladins. However, while Paladins was a hero-based shooter that was clearly copying the formula of Overwatch, Realm Royale is a battle royale-style game that’s obviously patterning itself on Fortnite, with a similar cartoony style and even a giant blimp that carts everyone in at the start of the match. I should note that this game technically comes attached with a label signifying this as a “beta”, though it’s been that way since it was released over a year ago, so this seems to be the case of a game that’s in a perpetual beta state to the point where we should probably just all ignore the word “beta” here.

Unlike Paladins, Realm Royale’s framerate is locked to 30FPS, so this isn’t quire the accomplishment of its predecessor, but it still looks good, the cartoony style suits it well, and while I did notice some texture pop-in, for the most part there’s not too much to complain about here. Having said that, there’s not too much here to celebrate, either. The game looks good, but is lacking the same level of personality you can find in both Paladins and Fortnite in different areas. It doesn’t have anything even close to Paladins’ wonderful character designs and animations, and it doesn’t have the unique, original style of Fortnite. Instead, this feels like a derivative of Fortnite with perhaps a few hints of Paladins, rather than its own thing.

The gameplay is a bit better in the originality department, at least. Gone is Fortnite’s structure-building component, and in its place are character abilities you can gain from chests and swap out like weapons. Furthermore, both weapons and abilities can be scrapped to gather resources to forge better weapons at select locations. And even before jumping into a match players can select one of four classes with a custom loadout to compliment their own personal playstyle. Finally, downed players in Realm Royale don’t crawl for safety like in Fortnite, but instead turn into chickens that can flee for safety and return to human form if they’re able to survive for ten seconds.

All of this would be a nice change of pace from Fortnite that would do a great job of setting Realm Royale apart and making it worthwhile in its own right if not for what I found to be this game’s biggest flaw – the load times. This game is constantly loading. When you want to start a match, it takes a while loading to get you into a lobby… then has you waiting in that lobby… then has you waiting until your blimp can deploy. Once in gameplay, you can get killed extremely quickly (at multiple points, I was picked off before I could even scramble for a chest to get a weapon), at which point the game needs to load to get out of the match, only for you to start the cycle all over again. During my time reviewing this game, I’d wager I spent more time waiting for the damn thing than actually playing it.

For the sake of being comprehensive, I can say that yes, this game supports cross-play on the Switch with other platforms, and yes, it also supports gyroscopic motion controls. While that’s all well and good, it doesn’t change my primary frustration with the game.

It’s a shame Realm Royale’s loading screens are so overbearing, because this had a lot of potential to be a good alternative to Fortnite. The crafting element, the custom loadouts, the fun chicken mechanic… these are all good departures from the Fortnite formula that bring something interesting to the genre. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to recommend this game for the brief snippets of fun that I had when the majority of my experience was spent waiting to actually play the game.

tl;dr – Realm Royale is a free-to-play Third-Person Shooter set in the same world as Paladins, but with battle royale gameplay like Fortnite. This game offers a few clever departures from Fortnite in its gameplay that have a lot of potential, but that potential is all but demolished by the game’s horrendously long and frequent load times, which you will likely see more of than actual gameplay.

Grade: C+

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