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Splitgate review: a raucous FPS that’s much more than Halo meets Portal0 etty good. It’s pr 0
0 etty good. It’s pr 0
You might have heardSplitgatedescribed as “Halo meets Portal”, a useful shorthand for those of us with brains too tired to describe it more colourfully as “a gun learns physics” or “Benny Hill gets a battle rifle”. However you describe it, Splitgate is a belter of a multiplayer arena shooter, born of gimmickry, yet graduating with honours, it’s a grin-delivering game of tight, gun gymnastics and wacky Loony Tunes doorways, and just the right amount of frustrating to make you sweat and launch into another scramble for the bazooka in the middle of the map.
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Any trailer will reveal at once how it works. At its most vanilla, you’re racking up kills in a team deathmatch using carbines, plasma rifles, shotguns, SMGs, rocket launchers - all the usual suspects (most of them with a familiar Halo “pop”). But you’re also flicking out portals with a tap of a button. You can only place portals on certain blue mesh surfaces. But there’s no cooldown for the ability, and you can close portals with a tap. You also get special grenades that blast away enemy portals, which will appear as red ovals on a wall, filling you with unease. Unease because you can’t see what’s on the other side of any portal that isn’t your own. You can only see that it’s there. A crucial veil that makes portal shootouts unpredictable, clever and frequently daft.
These two modes are my least favourite. They are high stakes. I feel like a letdown if I don’t pull my weight, or die early. Plus the six maps ringfenced for Showdowns all have the same clinical art style, despite having different layouts, their generic names ranging from “Simulation Alpha” to “Simulation Foxtrot”. It’s hard to tell the difference between these small, shiny arenas, especially when starting out. When portals make every map a quantum warren of death, I really want a houseplant or a vending machine to remind me which part of the maze I’m dying in.
The BFB bat is a force to be reckoned with.
Naturally, there are some disappointments woven into this free-to-play fabric. Weapon pickup can be a bit unruly. The rocket launcher could also do with a bit more splash, if you ask this explosion liker. Likewise, the melee attack feels weak, not because it doesn’t do decent damage (it chews up half a health bar) but because it often lands “flat”.
See, there’s a magnetism to the melee attack of a Spartan from Halo. A little oomph of forward momentum, a little tracking, before the knuckle or elbow crunches down. That’s also technically present in Splitgate, but often it doesn’t “activate” and the resulting punch feels like a dull slap. (The gleeful exception is when you hit somebody with the BFB, a chunky baseball bat with one-hit-kill heft. That’sgot the whack-magnets, all right.)
