Flashy MOBA battle royale Supervive is opening its doors during Steam Next Fest—and it's already got that Blizzard/Riot polish from its expat devs in spades

Supervive, as part of Steam Next Fest, has opened its doors for a week—making it available to play until October 21 with matchmaking servers in Europe, North America, and Asia. Formerly known as Project Loki, it's an effort by Theorycraft, a studio of former devs from Riot and Blizzard, to carve out its own little nook of the MOBA market—and boy howdy does it show.

I've played a little already and, being experienced enough in MOBAs to know that I'm about 500 hours off a proper critical take of this thing (they are complicated games), I'm honestly impressed by what I've seen so far. Its character designs, visuals, and animations are all polished to a mirror sheen—such a recognisable blend of art styles between Riot and Blizzard that it's almost uncanny, and superbly animated. One look of these characters absolutely makes me feel 'yep, that's an Overwatch', for good or for ill.

It's making an effort to keep the battle royale formula—something I'm not really a fan of—fast paced and action heavy. You can knock out about five-to-six matches in an hour, depending on how quickly you get wrecked.

Supervive plays in the space that Battlerite—a game I'm still grieving after it (ironically) tried to do a battle royale version and fell on its face—left in my heart. In fact, I'm feeling a bit of the same malaise here. I much preferred Battlerite's arena mode, and while Supervive does have a 4v4 brawl, it's clearly not the main focus.

Like Battlerite, Supervive's combat takes your usual MOBA team fights and makes them pure skillshot flex-offs. The major difference here is the inclusion of a jump button, which allows you to scale ledges and, if you double-tap it, glide across chasms. If you get hit while you're gliding, you get punished—either by being spiked into the ground or, if there's no ground to get spiked into, dying. This means fleeing an engagement by island-hopping is innately risky. Overall, this game's got movement and jukes a-plenty.

Matches follow the standard battle royale beats. Your job is to kill creeps, unlock vaults, and establish bases while staying inside an ever-shrinking storm—there's a big variety of objectives here. You can go to specific nodes called Oracles see where team fights are, you can visit respawn beacons to revive your whole team from a distance (though you also alert others to your presence), there's a train with a bunch of loot on it doing laps, and matches all have unique modifiers. Theorycraft gives players reasons to bump into each other and keep things grooving.

Encounters with enemy duos and teams are wild, frenetic, and will take a few dozen hours before you're familiar with the game to actually know what's going on. This is less of a complaint and more just how the genre works—Supervive clearly has a rich and textured metagame going on with room for plays.

In terms of how it all controls? Swimmingly. It's rare to play a game that's this frictionless this early on in development—in fact, it's almost a bit much. Supervive flows so smoothly it feels downright slippery at times, like you're trying to wrestle control of a ferrari over an ice field. It's a game for the kind of play-making, twitch-decision wunderkinds who appear on League of Legends highlight reels.

This really comes into focus when a new player, like myself, is trying to wrap my brain around the battle royale/MOBA elements at play. There are items and, presumably, a meta-game, but I'm not really sure where I'd have time to soak any of it in outside of hitting the books, forums, or YouTube guides. There's a smart loot button that lets you snag all the upgrade items from your fallen enemies, but it's all extremely intimidating. It doesn't help that actually looking at what an item does is a bit finickity, given your mouse also swings the camera around.

The front-loaded complexity of a MOBA marries with the battle royale shtick in the same way it always does—a blaring mess of information that'll give you a headache if you don't take your time with it. If this all sounds like criticism, it sort of is—as it stands, the game doesn't do a super job at teaching much of anything, bar a scant few tutorials—but that's just a hallmark of the genre. To gripe too much about it would be like walking into a high-tier strategy game and going 'there's a lot of menus here, then!'

I'm mostly just here to let you know what you're in for. If you're the kind of person who relishes in the rampant chaos of your average high-level MOBA matches—if you like making pro gamer plays and styling on your enemies—Supervive has already got that in spades; it's exactly your kind of freak. There's a supremely complex and octane-filled game already flourishing here, and it's doing exactly what it sets out to do with a dab-hand professional flourish.