Chinese OEM Xiaomi is working on its own spin on the battle royale game trend, and now that it’s entering beta, you can apply to try it out. The upcoming game is being referred to as “Survival Game” for now, and will follow a far-future sci-fi aesthetic that does not seem to have been done in the genre just yet. The game appears to be approaching the battle royale shooter trend from a number of new angles, and in Xiaomi’s own words, the goal of the project is to make Survival Game “the best game in the battle royale genre”. That lofty claim means it would have to leapfrog the fine detail of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode, the pick-up-and-play offered by PUBG, and the unique living ecosystem of Fortnite, to name just a few competitors. If you’d like to give the game a whirl and go along for Xiaomi’s ambitious ride, head to the company forums, where a thread about the game contains a link to a Google Forms sheet that you can use to apply for closed beta access.
Background: For starters, the game will introduce a new mechanic to the genre in the form of flight, something that hasn’t had a major presence in the multiplayer shooter space outside of Hi-Rez’s longstanding Tribes series. The space-future setting opens the game up to a lot of play conventions and conveniences of the setting that other games may not be quite as open to. Information on just what the game will be like is sparse at this point, suffice it to say that the “battle bus” has become a spacecraft, flight through multiple methods has been incorporated into players’ loadouts, and characters can be customized with special chips that impart all sorts of benefits, meaning that each player will have a unique play experience.
Impact: The screenshots are somewhat promising, at a basic level, and Xiaomi seems dead set on propelling this game to the top of the battle royale space. Those lofty ambitions, to be frank, don’t seem to match up to current screenshots on a technical level, so it will either fall to gameplay to elevate the game, or this is simply an early-development beta that will be changed significantly before the final release. While the graphics are underwhelming at this point, there are still many technical points that could be used to pull ahead of competitors when the game is actually in motion, such as smoothness and game mechanics. The game is unique in its setting and some of its conventions, and the flight mechanic brings a tactical twist to battle royale. The initial test run is going to be for Android gamers only, which potentially means that Xiaomi will be making the game available on a wider variety of platforms. In any case, the game will have to compete with both current competitors in the field and whatever competition may pop up in the future, riding the coattails of Epic Games’ wildly popular Fortnite.
