While its fields, hills and crumbling buildings make it similar to every other survival game, it's unusual for how many memorable locations it holds. Its first (and for a long time only) map is the island of Erangel. Plunkbat is a systemically simple game and it's through level design that it most shapes player behaviour. Erangel is huge, but it's come to feel like home. I'd taken gunfire while driving at speed across that bridge I'd lain prone atop the nearby hill, scoped rifle aiming down at the people below I'd hidden and died here a dozen times. I ran as fast as I could, sloping downhill towards the bridge that connected the main island to a smaller one to the south. My best hope of survival was still to follow the road, even though it took me even closer to the shimmering painwall that was already closing in. They got in the car and raced away, crashing through fences in their rush to reach the safe zone. I would learn later while watching the replay that I had shot this person successfully twice, injuring them severely, but it wasn't enough. I fired once, twice, three times, and in a panic started to spray my shots. That the game supports all these experiences - quick deathmatches, tense stealth, lonely hikes and battle-bus bants - seems the key to its runaway popularity throughout its early access development. For a couple of weeks last year, Adam and I conducted most of our editorial meetings while playing Battlegrounds, alternating conversation between where to go and what articles we needed to commission that week. The alternative is to play in groups of two, three or four and fill that space with friendly banter. You can choose to head straight to popular areas and fight, live or die from the game's opening seconds, or you can parachute into the wilderness, lock yourself in a bathroom, and enjoy the thought that something could happen at any moment. When will you meet another player? Will that other player see you? Where Battlegrounds differs is that it gives you greater control over the answers to those questions. This tension is familiar to anyone who has ever played the military sims that are Plunkbat's forebears, such as Arma and its zombie spin-off DayZ. If you mostly play solo, as I do, it's tension that fills the void. But by giving players space, Plunkbat creates gaps between action that you can fill with two possible alternatives. Both of those stages, you'll notice, involve weapons. Your existence in its world happens primarily through two stages: the first in which you scavenge for weapons the second in which you use those weapons. This is not to say that Plunkbat encourages non-violence. It is technically possible to win without attacking anyone, if you get absurdly lucky. I have come third many times without firing a single shot. Killing is just one possible means to that end. The game's two maps are 8x8km, rounds take about 25 minutes, and your goal is to survive. Battlegrounds, better known as Plunkbat, stretches time and space in a way that makes combat almost optional. Most multiplayer shooters make conflict inevitable and frequent, offering satisfaction to players solely through combat. I did something I rarely do in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. I'd just spotted one 20 yards ahead of me by the side of a road when another player, one of the hundred people fighting to be the sole survivor on this island, sprinted past me in that same moment, heading straight for the car. My only hope of reaching safety was to find a vehicle. That's how I ended up on the southern coast of Erangel, as far as it was possible to be from the randomly placed circular safe area.

Playerunknowns battlegrounds review