Flashy MOBA battle royale game Supervive opens its doors during Steam Next Fest – and has already received the Blizzard/Riot polish from its expat developers

SURVIVE | PLAY NOW at Steam Next Fest – YouTube

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Supervive is open for a week as part of Steam Next Fest and is available to play on matchmaking servers in Europe, North America and Asia until October 21st. Formerly known as Project Loki, it’s an attempt by Theorycraft, a studio formerly owned by Riot and Blizzard, to carve out its own little corner of the MOBA market – and boy howdy does it show.

I’ve played a bit, and since I’ve had enough experience with MOBAs to know that I’m about 500 hours away from really looking critically at this thing (they’re complicated games), I’m honestly impressed with what it is I have seen far. Its character designs, graphics and animations are all highly polished – such a recognizable mix of art styles between Riot and Blizzard that it’s almost eerie and superbly animated. For better or worse, just looking at these characters makes me feel like, “Yes, this is an Overwatch.”

Several characters from Supervive, an action MOBA battle royale developed by Theorycraft Games, posed in various battle-ready stances. — (Image credit: Theorycraft Games)

It tries to keep the battle royale formula – something I’m not really a fan of – fast-paced and action-heavy. You can eliminate about five to six games in an hour, depending on how quickly you perish.

Supervive takes place in the space that Battlerite – a game I still mourn after it (ironically) tried to do a battle royale version and got turned on its head – left in my heart. In fact, I feel a bit of the same discomfort here. I liked Battlerite’s Arena mode much better, and while there is 4v4 combat in Supervive, it’s clearly not the focus.

Like Battlerite, Supervive’s combat takes the usual MOBA teamfights and turns them into pure skillshot flex-offs. The main difference is that there is a jump button, which allows you to climb ledges and, if you double-tap it, slide over chasms. If you get hit while sliding, you will be punished – either by being stabbed into the ground or, if there is no ground to be stabbed into, you will die. This means that escaping combat by island hopping is inherently risky. Overall, this game offers a lot of movement and jukes.

The games follow the standard battle royale beats. Your job is to kill creeps, open safes and build bases while navigating an ever-shrinking storm – there’s a wide variety of objectives here. You can go to specific hubs called Oracles to see where teamfights are taking place, you can visit respawn beacons to revive your entire team remotely (although you’ll also alert others to your presence), there’s a train with a Amount of loot making its rounds and matches all have unique modifiers. Theorycraft gives players reasons to clash with each other and keep things going.

Encounters with opposing duos and teams are wild and hectic, and it takes a few dozen hours before you get the hang of the game and actually know what’s going on. This isn’t so much a complaint as it is the way the genre works – Supervive clearly has a rich and structured metagame with room for play.

In terms of how everything is controlled? Floating. It’s rare for a game to run so smoothly so early in development – in fact, it’s almost a bit much. Supervive flows so smoothly that at times it feels downright slippery, like trying to gain control of a Ferrari across a field of ice. It’s a game for the kind of playful and decisive prodigies that appear on League of Legends’ highlight reels.

This is especially evident when a new player like myself is trying to get acquainted with the battle royale/MOBA elements. There are items and probably a metagame, but I’m not really sure where I would have time to absorb some of it other than reading books, forums or YouTube guides. There’s a smart loot button that lets you grab all the upgrade items from your fallen enemies, but it’s all extremely intimidating. It also doesn’t help that it’s a little difficult to actually see what an item is doing, considering the camera also pans around with the mouse.

Joule, a lightning-fast character in Supervive, prepares to kill her enemy with a thunderclap.

(Image credit: Theorycraft Games)

The ostensible complexity of a MOBA combines with the battle royale style in the same way – a blaring mess of information that will give you a headache if you don’t take the time to deal with it. If this all sounds like criticism, it is – as it stands, the game doesn’t do any criticism super I’m tasked with teaching almost everything, except for a few tutorials – but that’s just a hallmark of the genre. Complaining about this too much would be like going into a high-level strategy game and saying, “Then there are a lot of menus here!”

I’m mostly just here to let you know what’s coming up. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys the rampant chaos of an average MOBA match at a high level – if you like making pro gamer plays and styling your enemies – Supervive already has that in spades; This is exactly your kind of freak. An extremely complex and cutting-edge game is already blossoming here, which does exactly what it is supposed to do with professional verve.

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