It's a bold statement for a game to say that it will "revolutionize how you think about the [battle royale] genre." It sounds so forceful, so Elon-Muskian. But while I'm as wary of vapid marketing as I am of games with all-caps names, our own Joseph Knoop's pithy description of upcoming battle royale game Super People as "PUBG with superpowers" was all I really needed to hear for it to get my attention.
And 'PUBG' here isn't just a shorthand for 'battle royale game'. From its austere art style to its third-person perspective, knockdowns, blue energy wall of death and gritty military hardware, Super People seriously channels that PUBG formula up to a point... before injecting it with a mystery goo that sees players teleporting, hyperspeed-running and leaping all over the map.
The closed beta for this frolicky free-to-play twist on PUBG starts December 7th, and you can register for it through the game's official site. The site also mentions that you can "improve your chance of tester selection" by adding the game to your wishlist, which seems a little bit cheeky but hey, you can always remove it later (says the guy who still had Godus on his wishlist until about 10 seconds ago).
Unlike PUBG, Super People is asymmetrical and hero-focused, featuring 12 playable characters each with three to four preset superpowers and skills. Perform enough feats on the battlefield, and you eventually unlock an 'Ultimate' skill. So if you want to blink around the map like a modern-day Corvo Attano, run your enemies down at 50mph, or shoot a 20-foot wall of fire that insta-cooks everyone in its path, you'll need to earn it by killing players and being ballsy.
Super People looks like the right kind of PUBG bastardisation; suspenseful standoffs get turned around by players teleporting to new angles or leaping 20 storeys into a tower and, while there's still room for sneaky plays and shotgun-camping, it can be countered by characters with scanners and other tracking devices.
It looks great, and you can play it—albeit in probably quite a janky state—from December 7th! If anything, I wish that they went even further into the superhero sphere, replacing realistic weapons with hand-fired projectiles and, I don't know, super-stretchy Dhalsim limbs. Still, while Super People might not become the battle royale revolution promised in the blurb, it looks like a very interesting deviation.
