

However, this loadout starts you with a shotgun and affords the most carry capacity, lending it a semblance of balance. The climbing gear, by contrast, is borderline useless because most of your time is spent away from elevation and the ziplines are few and far between. The snowboard (my favorite) is the most versatile and it lets you do cool tricks when jumping – who doesn’t like that? Both the hang glider and snowboard start with a pistol. The hang glider is the fastest, but the limitation is that you obviously need elevation to jump from. At the start of each map you pick from one of three loadouts: hang glider, snowboard, or climbing gear. Plus, players are just a lot more mobile here.

And when the storm shrinks the map, the sections it cuts off initially are much larger than most other battle royale games’ initial circle, which constricts players together very quickly. Since there are only 60 players as opposed to the usual 100, the map has a habit of feeling empty at times, but the spawn location visibility at the start helps make sure you can find other players early if you want.

There’s only a single map right now, but it’s a large one.
RING OF ELYSIUM DOWNLOAD SIZE PC FREE
Other than that, Ring of Elysium is entirely free to play if cosmetics don’t matter to you at all. I don’t usually pay for optional cosmetics in games, but I ended up dropping $10 for this season’s content and look forward to unlocking all of the skins. There’s a robust “Adventure Pass” that works just like Fortnite’s Battle Pass, in which you unlock tiers of rewards that include new skins and XP boosts, many of which can only be accessed if you pay for the season’s pass. Outside the action, Ring of Elysium also takes inspiration from another source for how it asks you for money. Regardless, as an Early Access game that’s only been out for around three months, it’s off to an incredibly polished start. It all works well, but visually their inspiration is clear. There’s a visual resemblance as well in terms of the art style’s focus on realism and even the menus and UI elements look nearly identical to PUBG, to the point where screenshots might even confuse some people. The pace is relatively slow and deliberate, involving lots of ducking behind cover, thoroughly looting houses, equipping weapon attachments, and lining up headshots from a hundred meters away. Characters have a noticeable weight and slowness which affords a satisfying realism to the movement and animations. On the other hand, a lot of the moment-to-moment gameplay feels extremely familiar to anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time with PUBG – largely in a good way, but also a bit of a letdown since Ring of Elysium tries so hard to innovate everywhere else. This can create utter chaos and sheds a bright light on what makes Ring of Elysium feel so new. The evacuation zone is clearly marked for everyone so it results in a mad dash as each person scrambles for the chopper and shoots down others trying to climb the ladder. So regardless of whether you play as a four-person squad or not, only four people can leave the match alive, and that gives the last moments a fresh and completely exhilarating change of pace. Instead, as the storm closes in and wreaks havoc on your surroundings, a helicopter flies in to rescue survivors – but it’s only got four seats. It's a mad dash as each person scrambles for the chopper and shoots down others trying to climb the ladder.Outside of that, the biggest change that Ring of Elysium introduces is that there is not just one single winner at the end of a match.
