Splitgate (Xbox Series X)

If you start building levels up higher in a first-person shooter, it can come with a few risks. Having the high ground is a big advantage after all, but in Splitgate, there’s rarely such a safe spot. While you might be trying to snipe from on high or peeking around a corner, all the other players have to do is place a portal behind you and they can suddenly change a long range encounter into a close-up brawl. The level itself may not be changing, but because you can essentially connect two places instantly with your portal gun, battles in Splitgate can come with all sorts of surprises and interesting tactics to make it more than just another sci-fi shooter.

 

Splitgate is focused purely on competitive multiplayer, there being no story to tackle and the only goals beyond having a good time playing match after match being challenges that can help work you towards unlockable outfits and weapon skins. A plethora of missions will reward you for performing certain actions, usually things like utilizing a weapon often, pulling off something tricky with portals, or winning in specific game modes. There will never be an unfair advantage gained through the rewards you gradually accrue, although while you can get some flashy looking weapons and some outfits that break away from the heavily armored space marine look to feature robots or even a human without a helmet, it feels like it’s mostly for your own benefit. In matches, the default setting is to have all enemy players wear red, you able to see your allies in their nice gear but the enemies will have certain aspects covered up with this admittedly smart setting that helps with visibility in sometimes large battlefields where spotting foes at a distance could have been rather hard otherwise.

The battle arenas of Splitgate are often a great fit for its central premise. Most of the maps center on one large area of interest, it usually rather open so players can get many vantage points from all sorts of angles. In Karman Station it’s a large bridge connecting the two buildings that house players, but there is also a tower and a smaller building looking out at the bridge too, players often able to see action by risking their own safety and peering at the central area. The portals end up making an area like this more navigable, although portals can only be placed on special bluish surfaces. This is to the game’s benefit, players can account for the possible portal angles and be ready to defend themselves, but portals are placed so you can quickly get to high ground, make an escape, or even lay an ambush where you place down your two portals and wait for someone to walk near one and shoot them through the hyperspace window you made. Every player can place two portals that can be stepped through or fired into with no issue, but uniquely, only you can see clearly through your portals. Even in team games, your allies will be able to tell a portal belongs to a friendly player but can’t see what’s on the other side of them. This also prevents utter chaos and makes your own portals uniquely useful, although if you do point your crosshairs at another player’s portal and they turn red, you’ll know you have a bead on an enemy so you can still fight back even if you can’t literally see the portal’s owner. Whenever you die your portals disappear which keeps the battlefield pretty clean and you also start each life with two grenades whose purpose is purely to destroy enemy portals, the game managing its portal mechanics pretty well to keep them from being overbearing or disruptive to the point it’s complete bedlam.

 

The maps engage with the portal mechanic in a few different ways. A common one is for the easiest way to ascend a building is to fire up a portal wall to reach your desired floor, and even in enclosed spaces there are often many viable surfaces so you can quickly change your angle of attack or egress if someone’s firing upon you. Foregone Destruction has very limited portal walls near the exterior points of interest, meaning you can often see a foe coming if they’re sloppy about when they try to cross the area. Crag and Abyss are smaller areas with a lot of halls, but the portal surfaces also make it so you can try and fight while in different areas. Olympus is a structure high in the sky with a big central tower and many platforms positioned out over open air to give very clear sight lines, and in a place like Oasis where there’s limited high ground, you know that if you go towards the central area you’re going to be easy pickings for those who have made their perches. Even the cramped rocky tunnels of Impact open up a bit to allow for some portal play, but not every stage feels like a perfect fit for this game’s defining feature. Pantheon features some high ground you can’t portal too, leading to some players who reach it exploiting their spot for easy kills. You do have a jetpack that can get you to higher ground, but it’s much slower than walking through a dimensional door that can be made in an instant. There are also nine special “Simulation” arenas that are much smaller and often coated in portal walls, these actually used in the game’s ranked modes likely because of their condensed size. However, having so many portal walls available does lead to the kind of hectic play that other parts of this experience almost avoided. A player can place portals beside themselves and you and shotgun you incredibly quickly, it hard to find spots that avoid rampant ambushes from skilled players. When you play Simulation maps in a mode like King of the Hill where the goal is to stand in a territory to control it, it can often feel like the hill is going to rapidly change hands so often that its a toss-up which team actually ends up winning.

With more than enough maps working very well though and even the weaker ones not always prone to chaos, Splitgate has a good foundation for its action plus the quality in gun design to make good use of the staging. The carbine is often your default tool in most modes, the gun firing at a fairly decent rate and its single shots are potent enough that most enemies can be taken out in two to three hits. Headshots are universally stronger whether it’s something like the rapid fire pistol or a sniper rifle landing the shot so some increased accuracy can lead to quicker kills, and usually your carbine will be backed up by some sort of fast-firing automatic like an assault rifle. Your arsenal isn’t always adventurous, the Battle Rifle fires quick strong bursts but it’s still not really a big change from how you’d handle something like the submachinegun, but you do have a rocket launcher, the plasma rifle that shoots balls of energy, and a few more unique options. The railgun charges up a powerful beam that is almost always going to kill if its hits the target and the BFB is a bat that is similarly lethal and even comes with some energy that lets you rush towards an opponent to make the early hits with the weapon easier to land. Most weapons can defeat an opponent fairly quickly, players able to retreat and avoid damage to refill their shields but most confrontations are quickly resolved due to the general strength of your weapons. Depending on the mode, this can be a boon. Team Snipers is all about long-range kills or, in Team Shotty Snipers, you have a shotgun for back-up in close range so it can be just as quick an encounter. Instagib’s name hints at the fact it’s all about railguns but without the charge period, and One in the Chamber will give you a single instant kill bullet where the only way to get another is to successfully land your shots. In these modes focused on immediate kills, you get the fast-paced and frantic action, but in other modes, it’s fairly easy to die to something you didn’t see, especially with portals involved. A few no-portal options exist, but the time it takes to kill a target definitely leans more towards swift encounters rather than tense and dodgy standoffs.

 

The guns are a well-curated set even if they perhaps lean towards killing too quickly in many cases, the game’s no-portal modes still able to be enjoyable because the arsenal is solid and that jetpack also gives players some good maneuverability. A few more modes continue to add different ways to play to help keep the game variety strong even after you’ve seen the maps and played around with the weapons. In fact, Gun Game’s entire premise is making use of the full arsenal well. Each time you kill someone in Gun Game, your weapon is swapped out for another, and while some will repeat, you still are rapidly changing how you approach battle as you work through the different ways each firearm is utilized. Since you won’t know what weapon the enemy players are on, this free for all mode leads to a lot of unexpected encounters and some interesting emphasis on flexibility. Domination on the other hand is a lot more focused and tense rather than a raucous run through everything on offer. Domination has two small teams duke it out, and when a player dies, the game’s usually incredibly quick respawns grow longer and longer. You lose a round of Domination if all your team members die at once, so a greater emphasis on caution makes this an unsurprisingly good fit for ranked mode despite the presence of Simulation maps. There’s Splitball where you grab a ball and need to survive with it for a while to gain points, Capture the Flag where teams charge into each other’s bases to steal flags, Juggernaut where only one player can score and they’re given more health but anyone who kills them becomes the Juggernaut, Showdown where weapons are randomized each round and players don’t respawn, and perhaps more important of all, a standard Team Deathmatch where it’s a race to the most kills. All the different modes and the challenges to shoot for make this online only multiplayer title addictive on top of varied, and while it’s still thriving at time of writing, it is a bit of a shame it was abandoned in favor of getting to work on a sequel. At the same time, most things can be earned through completely free play, so having a quality shooter with almost no strings attached to diving in and having fun will be a treasure for as long as it lasts.

THE VERDICT: Placing portals to be able to cross battlefields in an instant and get unique angles on the action is what draws players into Splitgate, but it’s everything around it that helps this concept shine. The maps are mostly designed well to give key areas to use portals intelligently, only a few feeling like they accidentally have blind spots or go a bit overboard. Chaos is generally avoided where it shouldn’t be but embraced in some of the game’s fast-paced modes, but the wide range of playstyles on offer also mean you can focus on more compact tense skirmishes or huge sprawling team battles. Smart limits keep portals from being overbearing and the weapon set is not always ambitious but still a great fit for the format, Splitgate an easy first-person shooter to jump into for quick action with a neat little twist.

 

And so, I give Splitgate for Xbox Series X…

A GOOD rating. Splitgate isn’t afraid to come right out up front on its store page and say it is essentially Halo meets Portal, the gunplay and even character designs borrowing heavily from Microsoft’s sci-fi FPS while the portal mechanic works almost identically to how portals did in Valve’s puzzler right down to the momentum preservation letting you jump down into a portal to launch yourself out the other end at high speeds. It’s a pretty solid way of giving players an immediate idea of what they’re in for, even if it lacks the single-player substance of those adventures and instead lasers in on providing a wide range of ways to fight with portals. The many modes of Splitgate feel like its secret recipe for success, because while it has some very solid maps as well as community map making tools, its reframing the shooting that starts to explore how the small complication of portals can enhance so many types of battle. Not everything does come out clean, as mentioned with modes that lean on Simulation maps and some ideas like King of the Hill not always gelling the best with it, but then you have playstyles that thrive with the complication of being able to instantly connect to points across space. Sniping someone who was hiding indoors by placing a clever window, jumping in close to shotgun someone who was firing at you from range, it can be exhilarating to turn the tables with good portal use or quite a surprise when you’re on the other side of it. Wisely not every great level is too wide or large so different combat styles can thrive, Atlantis for example really focused on indoor spaces with even its circular chamber in the middle not that huge, but Olympus on the other hand revels in having so many players out in the open exposed unless they make good use of what cover and portal walls exist. More gun variety feels like it could improve the action, Gun Game having to recycle a few so it doesn’t end too soon showing that some additional options could be added to the most important part of a first-person shooter. At the same time, the portal system could make certain weapon ideas feel too strong or alternatively too weak considering how quickly players can die and respawn in this multiplayer experience, so if the arsenal we got in the end is the result of trimming ideas that didn’t fit, at least it left us with a good set of guns that work towards what makes this game so satisfying to play.

 

It’s not too surprising to see the creators move onto Splitgate 2 after they had hashed out how to make a great deal of modes and maps work with the portal feature. They constructed a mold with the original Splitgate and perhaps altering it too much could upset the balance, so a follow-up can build from a new foundation or change certain elements to better fit whatever new features they add to the experience. The original Splitgate doesn’t feel like a trial run though, mainly because it has packed in quite a good deal of unique ways to play that suit its intended pace and the incredible range of movement that portals and jetpacks give to every player. It would be nice to have more than the challenges to work towards, especially considering cosmetics are often covered up by the red coat of paint to help with visibility, but Splitgate mostly provides an entertaining free-to-play shooter experience with a twist that enhances it in key areas without dominating how the game is played.