When it comes to war games, I have two very distinct memories.
The first, and to this date the best war mission that will ever exist, is playing the D-Day mission in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Playing through the Omaha beach landing was one of the most realistic and enthralling I could have ever imagined, and there is nothing that has made me feel the same way since.
The second is playing Battlefield 1942. It was one of the first massive army versus army games that I got into, and it gave me that feeling of being part of a war. While I wasn’t ducking and diving in my chair like I did with Medal of Honor, it still gave me one of the best war-like experiences in terms of vehicular combat and holding control points.
Since then, while there have been some amazing military-style FPS shooters since, I feel like they haven’t quite hit the nail on the head like those original games did. Yes, Call of Duty gives you a fast-paced, close combat fight, and Battlefield still has those massive battles, but they don’t feel that epic anymore.
That was until a new recruit joined the squad, Battlebit: Remastered.
BattleBit: Remastered is a game that’s been seven years in the making, and it’s still only in Early Access, but it’s taken quite the journey to get here and honestly, I’m glad that it has.
At its core, the developers of the game wanted to create an FPS experience that would be accessible to all. Being gamers themselves that never had any of the hardcore hardware out there, they were never able to play the Battlefields, the Call of Duty’s and the Squads, so they set out to create something just as good, but for everyone.
This is why the game graphics are low poly, but don’t let that fool you; this game has more packed inside it than any of the AAA studios out there could hope to achieve.
The game started off as a mil-sim style, low poly FPS game, but after its first closed beta completely tanked in 2016, the developer, SgtOkiDoki, took that feedback and went straight back to work. Four years later, and a new game called the “remastered” version, we get a more arcade-style, epic battle shooter. During two more very successful, closed beta tests, the developers decided to lower the price of the Early Access game from R380 to R210 to allow for more people to enjoy it, rather than pump the price up due to its newfound success. If actions like this don’t shout “made for the community”, then I don’t know what else does.
Besides all the nice-guy plays that SgtOkiDoki and his team have made, they have still poured in countless hours and ensured exceptional detail in the game. Every gun is designed to feel and act as real as possible. Driving Humvees through tough terrain feels how it should if you were to sit behind the wheel yourself, and other military simulation features like combining ammo clips still exist even though the game has slightly shifted away from that style. The team has paid careful consideration to sound as well. Every type of terrain sounds different, and every bullet whizzing past your head sounds like it’s whizzing past your head, at times the low poly graphics may slightly pull you out of the immersion, but as soon as you encounter another enemy and the grenades start flying, while the triggers get squeezed, you’re pulled right back into the bloodshed.
The game pushes voice chat quite hard as well. You don’t need to use it, and it can be completely disabled, but the immersion is only amplified as you run down the street, the buildings collapsing on your left, and you hear the faint cries of your teammates shouting for a medic, their shouts getting louder the closer you get. Sure, sometimes someone will be blaring out obscenely loud songs from Kanye West, but most of the time, the players in the game take it a little more seriously and are usually calling out orders, shouting for medkits or making hilarious death noises as they slowly bleed out.
Jumping into BattleBit: Remastered takes me straight back to the days when it felt like dev studios actually cared about the games they made. It feels like the team here wanted to create a realistic feeling war game that’s accessible, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. Even though the buildings, vehicles, players and decorations look like they’ve been copy-pasted from Roblox I am transported to the middle of an all-out war, and I find myself ducking, diving and having an absolute blast.
Of course, the game does include grinding out camos, attachments and weapons like we’re all used to in the current set of FPS games out there, so you won’t feel out of place jumping into BattleBit and with 200 ranks to get through, there’s quite a bit of grind.
The game’s maps are playable in both day and nighttime modes, and it makes a huge difference to how you approach each one. This includes details like turning on the lights in your vehicle or not being able to look down the scope on your rifle if you have your night vision goggles on. There are quite a few game modes, with the most played being the large-scale 127/127, 64/64 and 32/32 maps. Personally, I feel the 127 v 127 maps can be a bit too large at times and the 64 v 64 just right, but it all depends on what style of game I want to play at the time, and I love that I have the option to choose. Every option loads into a server quite quickly, and there are no bot players, adding to the dynamics that real players bring with them. In terms of local servers, there are no official announcements made yet, but with the 2.0 release, they were working on a feature to address community servers, so it’s likely we should see local servers soon.
Now, I’m not saying the game is perfect because it isn’t. There are things that sometimes don’t quite work as expected, and at times it feels like you just can’t live long enough even to see another player, but what is nice is that the dev team communicates with the community and patches, balance updates and fixes are constantly rolling out. I’ve felt a huge improvement in the game over the past few weeks.
New maps have been added, new vehicles have been added, overpowered weapons have been tweaked, and even things like enemy spotting have been discussed between the devs and the players.
What really makes BattleBit an amazing game is that everything feels thought out and correctly executed. There’s a beauty to this game that goes beyond the sexy sharp lines of a square, and I feel like everyone who says they enjoy first-person shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, has to give this game a shot.