Ring of Elysium Early Access Review

By David Jagneaux

Now that battle royale games have become legion, the new arms race is to find clever ways for a new game to set itself apart from the Fortnites and PUBGs of the world. In Tencent’s winter-themed Ring of Elysium, which recently launched as a surprisingly polished early access game with cosmetic-only microtransactions, there’s more than a little inspiration taken from those two behemoths, but its wintery theme, clever new ideas around movement, and exciting final moments make it feel distinct.

Here, a smaller-than-average group of 60 players (either alone, in pairs, or in groups of up to four) battle it out to escape a deadly blizzard that ravages remote mountain towns. But unlike the usual trudging around on foot or the occasional vehicle, Ring mixes up the way you get from point A to point B with a map that features not only ski lifts, but also gives you access to snowboards, hang gliders, and mountain-climbing gear. That change injects exciting creativity into the genre without going into off-the-wall fantasy.

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. 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. 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. 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. This can create utter chaos and sheds a bright light on what makes Ring of Elysium feel so new.

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. Characters have a noticeable weight and slowness which affords a satisfying realism to the movement and animations. 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. 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. It all works well, but visually their inspiration is clear. Regardless, as an Early Access game that’s only been out for around three months, it’s off to an incredibly polished start.

Outside the action, Ring of Elysium also takes inspiration from another source for how it asks you for money. 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. 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. Other than that, Ring of Elysium is entirely free to play if cosmetics don’t matter to you at all.

There’s only a single map right now, but it’s a large one. 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. 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. Plus, players are just a lot more mobile here. At the start of each map you pick from one of three loadouts: hang glider, snowboard, or climbing gear. The hang glider is the fastest, but the limitation is that you obviously need elevation to jump from. 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 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. However, this loadout starts you with a shotgun and affords the most carry capacity, lending it a semblance of balance.

One major break with battle royale tradition that I feel eliminates an exciting element of randomness and strategy is that Ring of Elysium ditches the air drop concept and simply lets you pick where you want to spawn on the map. Once the map loads you just appear on the ground, already holding a weapon, so the initial frantic looting for gear as soon as you land is all but lost. Instead, it’s more about immediately vying for position and finding the most advantageous point and just camping out. No one else, other than your teammates, can spawn exactly where you pick, but they can still spawn very close by, so there’s still some early-game danger.

Loot consistency is on par with PUBG as well, although healing items appear to be much more frequent here. There’s a similarly broad assortment of guns between pistols, assault rifles like the AK47 and M4A1, shotguns, and even advanced rifles from loot bags that fall from the sky. More variety comes from attachments like new grips, expanded magazines, and scopes to improve your guns. And again, everything from inventory management to equipping attachments feels almost identical to PUBG. But there are some subtle changes that make Ring of Elysium much more fluid and easy to play.

One of my favorites is that when you loot a compatible upgrade item it automatically equips itself to the gun you’re holding, so you no longer need to pick up a scope, open your inventory, equip the scope, then close the inventory. It’s just on your gun already. Not only that, but you can equip two scopes on a single gun and switch between them with the press of a single button, greatly improving a single gun’s versatility. It was also a blessing to have my guns automatically set to automatic instead of single shot, because that just makes sense. Both of those additions are just godsends to a frequent PUBG player like myself.

Perhaps most importantly of all, though, is that none of your three gun slots are locked to a specific gun type. So that pistol you spawned with? Chuck it out and roll three deep with assault rifles if you want. I usually opt for a rifle with a good scope, a submachine gun for rapid fire at mid-range, and a shotgun for when things get extra personal. This system gives you vastly more flexibility without artificially limiting your options. Snowboarding down slopes, SSX-style, and then rolling up on people with three two-handed weapons makes me feel way more powerful than most other battle royale games ever manage to.

Those all might seem like relatively minor changes, but it’s all in the name of streamlining things in a good way. Everything is less clunky, and when you combine the flexibility of movement options the monotony of aimlessly running through empty fields just vanishes. During one game I was riding in a ski lift, shooting at two snowboarders barreling down a mountain, while simultaneously fending off a hang glider that was trying to take out my partner and I while circling around our lifts in mid-air. The fact that all of that can happen while still feeling grounded and realistic is just wonderful.

Guns feel great, too, delivering powerful feedback. There aren’t a ton of advanced armor options to find, so you can kill people quickly if you get the drop on them like in PUBG, but most players have far more healing items here than in other games, making cover extremely crucial to bandage up and get back in the fight. The sound design is solid for the pops and bursts of weapons, but the wind’s howl could use some work. Ideally, it’d be great to have it dynamically affect how easy it is to hear someone else moving around you, but right now it’s more of just a background sound effect that cuts out every now and then. Hopefully, that gets melded into the soundscape more seamlessly in the future.

One of the other major additions Ring of Elysium introduces to how combat plays out is the inclusion of an actual cover system. If you’re close to a piece of cover like a building or a tree, your character automatically sticks to it and takes the best position to hide their body, similar to Rockstar games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Grand Theft Auto 5. If you press to aim, you’ll pop out in whatever direction the on-screen indicator shows to try and line up a shot. This system works very well and is dramatically superior to manually poking around corners like in every other battle royale game.

Since Ring of Elysium focuses on a winter theme, everything from the way you play and how the match evolves feeds off of that idea, lending a thematic cohesion that’s usually an afterthought for developers. Instead of a magical blue electric wall or a haze of purple magic, you’re trying to escape a devastating snow storm. As the zone shrinks the weather changes, with more wind and more snow particles, obscuring your vision. Eventually, it gets so cold you start to slowly take damage.

Leaning into the Christmas spirit of the current season, the map’s currently littered with ice-sculpted reindeer, Christmas trees, wrapped gifts, and more. When you kill a player their gear is in a present, ready for you to rip it open, and the loot bags that fall from the sky look just like massive toy bags Santa might carry around. It’s all a bit silly and clashes somewhat with the realistic style, but it makes me smile and appreciate the attention to detail. I’m excited to see how things evolve into the next year on this front because Tencent has already done a good job of dishing out steady updates with more to come.

As for what comes next for this relatively polished early access game, Ring of Elysium could go in a lot of different directions at this point. Tencent is already teasing a new game mode that appears to lean heavily on survival elements, which would be another welcomed addition to the battle royale genre that has surprisingly gone unexplored up to this point. In its current state though, it doesn’t really need anything else to be considered a complete battle royale game.