Final Word Royale - Review
I have been a massive fan of the battle royale genre ever since the early days, cutting my teeth on games such as PUBG and H1Z1: King of The Hill, I have always had great fun jumping into battle royal games with a squad of mates and trying to outsmart the competition. As it stands today the battle royale genre has become quite crowded and because of this new titles have a harder time standing out from the pack, the good thing about this for players is that developers now have to be more creative in terms of game mechanics to make their games stand out.
One of the twists on the genre that is starting to trend is battle royale word and typing games, titles such as Babble Royale laid the foundations for this formula a few years ago and I always thought it was an interesting take on the standard formula. This is where Final Word Royale steps into the arena with its interesting take on the genre.
Final Word Royale offers two modes of play one where you are dropped into a lobby with 19 other players (or bots) with the aim being to guess a word before your opponents do, adding tension to the scenario is the fact that a 5 minute timer continuously ticks down and you only have a certain amount of guesses at your disposal, fail to guess the word and your existence will be ended swiftly by your captor visiting the table and depositing a bullet in your head. The second mode sees 40 players compete against each other but this time you are tasked with unscrambling a certain set of letters to form a word. You go one on one with other players and eliminate them by unscrambling the word before them, watch out though as making any kind of mistake will cause one of your fingers to be chopped off via the gruesome looking contraption handily placed on the table, lose all your fingers and it is game over. You earn experience for winning or even participating in games, earn enough experience and you go up a level, though I am not sure what this actually achieves as there no perks or cosmetics to work towards so this is seemingly a meaningful mechanic, unless the devs have plans to implement cosmetics or rewards at a later date.
Graphically the game looks like a scene straight out of one of the SAW movies, with you and your opponent’s sporting hessian cloth bags over your heads, strapped into chairs in a gritty warehouse setting. The grimy surroundings and your mysterious captor strolling from table to table with a loaded gun certainly do add tension to the situation.
The games main issue is that you will be playing against bots as there is simply not enough people playing online to form a lobby, in fact in the whole time I played the game I never saw a real person join my lobby, this is a real shame as playing against bots was just nowhere near entertaining enough to maintain any prolonged interest in playing the game. The other issue is that the list of words use in the game seems to be quite small which leads to repetition, not to mention it uses names and plurals to boost the word count which makes guessing words very frustrating. Final Word Royale has a solid concept going for it but the glaring issues such as lack of players and the absence of a progression system and rewards ultimately hold it back from being something I want to keep playing.
The Score
4.0
Review code provided by NyxWorks
The Pros
Visuals are competently designed which leads to a tense atmosphere
The Cons
No player base so you will be playing against bots which gets old quickly
Absence of progression system makes the player feel unrewarded for progressing in the game
For a game based around words the dictionary is quite small and the decision to include names as words is puzzling
