9/10 I was not entirely convinced at first but upon learning the game, this has got to be the best battle royale ever made. Picture Sekiro-like combat on a set of different battle royale maps with a lot of characters, each having their own (gimmickey) set of abilities and playstyles that you can choose.
It's melee favored, because ranged weapons are mainly used to poke the enemy before engaging or to catch them from escaping. Tare limited to durability and that takes time to replenish amidst the fight and to collect beforehand, upon other things that you will loot during the match. But that's of course not everything in the game.
The combat is really high quality and despite what noobs might want you to believe; button mashing will quite literally get you owned. There is an increidbly in depth attack system full of combos, for every single weapon that can dictate your entire playstyle or approach to combat and a set of souljades that go from neat stacking buffs to literal alterations that enhance your current weapon attacks.
There are some annoying and spammy ultimate abilities, however they can only be used once per fight and most of them leave you unable to chase, which makes securing kills pretty hard, as the movement in this game is probably the most important part.
Whatever can't catch you, can't fight you. And whatever can't fight you, can't kill you. With that being said, when starting out freshly, there certainly should be a lot of players that will be able to defeat you, since that is how niche competetive games work. With not enough casuals the sweats start cannibalizing eachother and thats not even neccessarily a bad thing, but as a new player with an unrecognized MMR you will mostly fight against bots in the beginning until the game starts dropping in real opponents, Even if I know that the guy that chased me down through the whole match will probably end me, I can at least start learning his attack pattern, like with some Sekiro boss. Or maybe I could just sneak away and let him take out his wrath on some other unfortunate souls. That kind of experience is entirely unique to Naraka.
The game is completely Free to Play and everything I describe in the following segment are purely optional cosmetics that do not alter the mechanical gameplay. The in-game store is detailed and if you don't find luck with mostly free lootcrates that have an unmissable chance system, should you get unlucky enough, You could also purchase some cosmetics directly from the store for mostly real money. However, the game to me seems quite generous and whilst I spent some real currency, I also got multiple legendary outfits, weapon skins and cosmetic accessories and extremes (even rarer) just by playing. Since the community on asian servers (f.e. china) is so large, there are tons of events where they hand out free stuff and I managed to get quite lucky with some legacy lootboxes.
Sadly the only negatives I have to give is the games incredible size on my harddrive. Whilst that can be explained by tons of modes. Next to the usual battle royale casual, and ranked with solos, duos and trios, with some vanilla - like event modes or a team deathmatch. We also have f.e. the whole single player/ coop stuff the extraction mode, some event mode,.. Whilst everything is semi-regularly maintained, you can occasionally hit the 10-20+ GB seasonal patch, but that's probably just an internet (skill) issue on my end. It runs surprisingly stable and you will quickly have patched access to the newest settings (upscaling algorythms, etc)
The only real bad thing that to me isn't objective is, that the game keeps getting shoved into a direction that to me looks more like a mobile game. Flashy new characters that basically force a disengage when ultiling since they will statcheck you. That#s not really bothering me though. What's awkward to me is the powercreep that leaves older and more beloved (and balanced and more fun to fight) characters in the dust. Then again, with enough gamesense on these aforementioned characters you can definitely still perform. Just maybe not as easily. It's a difficult debate and calling something "no skill" in an enviroment where "hold checking" has become the basic means of traveling the map on foot.
Overall the best free game that I haver ever played. And I definitely haven't played enough, If you can give this game a shot and learn just the basics of the simple movement tech or combat 1&1, you will find yourself become anime. And that's also a feeling that no other game can provide.
Also the trailers look dope every season.
