The past weekend I got a chance to play around with the closed beta of My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble. This game is a full-on battle royale using the characters and abilities of the cast of My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble. The current cast of characters that were available to play were the following:
- Izuku Midoriya (Played as)
- Katsuki Bakugo (Played as)
- Ochaco Uraraka (Played as)
- Shoto Todoroki (Did not play as)
- Tsuyu Asui (Played as)
- All Might (Played as)
- Cementoss (Did not play as)
- Mt. Lady (Played as)
- Tomura Shigaraki (Did not play as)
- Dabi (Played as)
- Himiko Toga (Played as)
- Mr. Compress (Did not play as)
That’s more characters than I originally thought would be available, and as you can see, I tried to play them all. Well, now it’s on to my thoughts of the beta.
Detroit Smash
My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble divides the game into eight teams of three people each. You are usually best to play different roles in the game, yet you are not able to play as the same character as someone else on your team. This was unfortunate because I wanted us to play as three All-Mights on my team just to see how much fun that could be, but nope sadly it wasn’t meant to be.
You choose the location you start on the map while a timer is counting down. You can see where your allies drop before the timer is up, but once the timer reaches zero, everyone’s choices are displayed on the screen, giving you a quick peek at the enemies surrounding you. You get to touch down on the island where this all takes place, scrambling to find chests and items like you would in any other battle royale. Items you can get are potions, guard potions, level-up cards, backpacks, and other player skill cards. Potions increase your health up to the maximum. Guard increases your guard gauge to what can be maximum for your character. When you get damaged your guard is affected. Once your guard is depleted, then your character’s health will start to be affected. Guard takes less damage from attacks than health does, so it is very important you keep your guard gauge filled.
Each hero and villain has access to three different skills; one that is ranged and two that are unique to the character. They also have a big special type of ability that is very special to the character. For instance, All Might can jump very far, and Mt. Lady can grow huge. Every character plays extremely differently with their unique skill sets. They also have different roles, support, damage dealer, rapid, etc. I didn’t play every character the beta had to offer, but I really enjoyed the ones I did play. I loved playing as Mt. Lady the most just because I enjoyed growing ever so big becoming a distraction, but also being able to do massive AoE close-range damage in big brawls. The bad thing is it also alerts people to your location because the map itself may have multiple regions, but it is flat enough you can see quite a fair distance away.
I honestly prioritized my ranged skills whenever possible because it seemed that many players would default to running away when they were low on health. Fights sometimes felt extremely chaotic, especially when full team vs. team fights were happening. When it was just you vs someone else, they seem manageable, but sometimes you will get a stray blast that will hit you from another fight, or you will have another player surprise you and try to kill you or the person you were fighting. When you get downed, you have to wait for someone to pick you up or not to get hit for 20 seconds, and then your character will just get up anyway. It was nice if someone randomly attacked the guy attacking you when you go down so you could crawl away from the battlefield for 20 seconds to get back up in the action.
If you do end up dying, you can still get extra points by cheering on your teammates, and if they get a kill while you were cheering for them, you get points from that kill as well. If you really want, you can switch your camera to someone on one of the opposite teams that is getting a lot of kills and cheer for them to get more points. Usually, though, I didn’t really care too much for points as the beta gave you a ton of in-game currency. I got most, if not everything I wanted for the characters I played with since it didn’t have a lot of variety for them at this time. Odds are, though, that will change when the game launches, and we get lots of add-ons and more cosmetics than we could possibly handle.
Fashionable Heroes
Let’s go over the more cosmetic side of this game. You start with a default outfit and an in-game shop that allows you to buy various outfits, voices, and emotes with the in-game currency called coins. If you have enough coins, you can buy gacha pulls. During the beta, we got a lot of free summons on the gacha just for logging in every day of the beta went on.
You also got tickets to pull for playing the game and being alive as well for kills in the game. I believe I got all of Deku’s outfits, voice lines, and emotes in the game, and probably all of them for a few other characters, which made me extremely happy. Some of these outfits look really good. You got some of the staples of the series like the UA outfits for the students, you get All Might’s striped business suit, various villain suits that showed up in the series for the villains, and even some fun casual outfit designs.
Plus Ultra
Overall, I felt that the beta played pretty well. Not too much jank for being a beta. The hitboxes made sense, and there might be balance issues like Dabi and Todaroki having very powerful AoE abilities that put places on fire that can kill you just traveling around it. Having really unique playstyles for each character is a huge plus and adds a lot of variety to the game. I didn’t like how squishy it feels once your guard gauge is gone, but I appreciate having a 20-second time to survive and get up without the need of allies to pick you up.
That aside, My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble has the makings of a good battle royale game. It’s a good start for anime games going into the battle royale formula and may inspire other anime tie-ins that have that genre of game. I don’t particularly like the genre, but I appreciate having it either way. We get a lot of people who get into various other mediums by trying out these types of games that remind them of Fortnite and other titles. I don’t think it will compete with any of the other big battle royale games, but it doesn’t need to.
My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble will be released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. However, Bandai Namco has not yet revealed when that will be.
