From the outside looking in, Supervive looks like many a top-down, twin-stick style shooter you may see on any given digital game store. It only takes a couple minutes after dropping into its massive battle royale-style map to see that it does more than just look like a beautifully modeled and animated computer action game you’ve might be familiar with, but it combines elements of many games from many genres to create a battle royale that is wholly unique, with a surprising amount to learn and do in each session outside of surviving against other teams. Clashes against enemies are frantic thanks to the big emphasis on fast and varied styles of movement and cleverly designed characters with abilities that interact with each other and their surroundings in far more interesting ways than just dealing damage.
These so-called Hunters are really the first place where I was particularly wowed by Supervive. Of the 14 that were available to me, all had completely different gameplans for success in battle than each other. Some characters were pretty obviously weird out of the gate, like this black hole-slinging crowd controller, but even ones that would be relatively straightforward in any other game had a feature that made them really pop. Huntress, for example, is the bow-wielder, meaning she has attacks you’d expect from this archetype – like being able to shoot a big arrow at longer range or a fan of arrows in a zone in front of you. But she can also move through walls like an X-Man, making her far more elusive than you might expect for a character that has to take extra time to aim relatively slow shots.
Support or utility-focused hunters are highly effective during combat in active ways. Pushing enemies around with a rapidly expanding wall or dashing to fallen comrades to rescue them from execution are just some of the small ways Supervive refreshes a role that is usually more passive. In fact, no matter who you choose, be it a spry ranged shooter or a front-line face-puncher, you’ll have some sort of movement and displacement ability, meaning you can always reposition to avoid enemy attacks or directly disrupt opponents. Seamless movement around the map and into, out of, and through combat mixed with the many ways you can abruptly move your foes out of position, into walls, or even one another, makes this game play so noticeably different than other tactical games like League of Legends or Battlerite that it takes plenty of inspiration from. You can be elusive and aggressive all in the same motion, which feels more like fighting game shenanigans than would be typical in a shooter like this. Most characters don’t have to wait for the right opening, they can make one themselves.
Before you even get to open combat with enemies, you’ll likely have to find them first. Supervive’s huge map is dense with regions that are hiding treasures within them. In the sessions I had, after choosing a location on the map and dropping, there was always a small recon period where we had to check our surroundings for opportunities to get loot or experience. Our first few encounters were usually with groups of NPC monsters that either roamed around locations or were camped out around corners waiting for unsuspecting players. Rarely were these monsters more than a nuisance on their own, but higher-level bosses can test your team's power, and any mob camp that gets wedged between a fight between enemy teams can often be a consequential factor in them. The map has a day and night cycle that makes monsters appear more frequently at night and levels them up in the morning, making longer games that much more dangerous in theory. In practice, they were rarely more than just ways to keep above the loot and level curve without killing other players.
When you aren’t trouncing the local wildlife, you can also find some important points of interest on the map that can be super valuable. Bonfires are early game hubs that allow you to repair your shields and upgrade items. When wandering the map, you can also return to them with the press of a button to regroup. Vaults were often a top priority too, as they held top-tier gear, so long as you could survive the test they’d spring on you to unlock them. Passive gear can be a bit confusing without putting a lot of reps into Supervive to figure out the best stat combos for your character (or getting advice from developers like I did). Active gear can come in many forms like building walls that only your squad can shoot through, summoning critters to do your bidding, or creating a giant cannon that rolls out giant cats whose purpose is yet to be determined. I really liked finding a new item and obsessing over it through the course of a match, but that's another thing that's hard to optimize without many matches under your belt.
The map itself, besides being filled with a smattering of different environments like desert sands, dilapidated ruins, and snowy hills, is broken up into islands separated by gorges that will lead to your death should you fall down them. When exploring, they’re a cinch to navigate thanks to a glider with a generous float time. A simple double jump feels like an Evel Knievel stunt when enemies are around, as one touch from them will send you crashing out of the air and into oblivion. When you’re downed on solid ground, you’re turned into a wisp as you await either revival or a more concrete death, and though you can’t be harmed by enemy attacks, you can be shoved around, making you an easy target for being kicked off of ledges. Lots of fights either start as one team attempts to strategically fly onto a landmass while another hogs the edges to keep them away, and many fights end with one team attempting to shove another into the void.
This, mixed with the maps being littered with walls and multi-level plateaus meant that simply strafing around one another in a pitched battle on even ground was more rare than pushing each other into obstacles and using them as tactical opportunities to pick each other off. It was very uncommon to see two or more teams tussle without any members of each side getting picked off. Getting killed was a pretty common occurrence, but there are so many ways to get revived that I never felt like I was condemned to twiddle my thumbs and watch the rest of the game for very long. This always meant that if you left even a single member of a team standing, that they were a team-reviving beacon or Most Wanted Takedown away from putting their whole team back on the map and evening the odds. For me, a person who is generally pretty average at battle royales, this was a great and forgiving way to give me as many chances as possible to redeem myself.
I had tons of fun with my hands-on time, but I couldn’t stop a question from nagging me in the background of all the chaos: is yet another live service game dead on arrival, regardless of how good it is? I asked CEO Joe Tung if the wild mood swings of the games industry is an existential threat to Theorycraft’s ambitions with Supervive. “It is absolutely an existential fear,” he replied. “And I think if anyone answers that they aren’t afraid of that, they must have a reality distortion field I don’t have.” He admits that this is a difficult time to release a game, especially in a free-to-play, games as a service business model that is becoming more and more crowded by the quarter. But in the face of lots of hard to predict externalities that they can’t control, Joe feels that Theroycraft has positioned themselves from day one to weather as many storms as the world throws at them. He credits the timing in which they raised money - late 2020-through 2021 when investors were more willing to spend of prospects - and committing to a fully remote team as a way to court the best talent he could find as part of the strategy that gives them a lot of extra runway to make sure they land this plane, even if it’s not a runaway success immediately.
With only an hour or so of rounds under my belt, I still have a lot to learn about Supervive. It’s a battle royale full of ideas, and some of the inspirations are pretty easy to identify - many games like it have big maps with hotspots worth fighting over for high level loot. But when it innovates on its own, like with its roster of dynamic and expressive characters, and lots of tactical options presented by its exciting movement system and roster of active and passive items, there’s no game quite like it. If you’re an Apex Legends fan who loves the unique flavor individual characters bring to a standard FPS, an Overwatch fan who loves objective-heavy team play, or a League of Legends fan who values tactics in their team-based skirmishing, you might want to spend some time with Supervive’s first big open playtest, running now until July 7th. You might be as surprised as I was to find so many core concepts of seeminging unalike games meld so well in one colorful package.
