Battlerite Royale gets new trailer ahead of Early Access launch this week

Battlerite Royale, the standalone battle royale spin-off of excellent MOBA brawler Battlerite, is gliding into Early Access on Wednesday, and to mark the occasion developer Stunlock Studios has released a new trailer showing us how an average match will unfold.

Players will start by dropping from the sky and slamming into the ground—no parachutes necessary—before exploring either solo or in teams. You'll gather loot by destroying small purple orbs, or you can unlock bigger red orbs (see 0:26) for better loot, but it'll take longer and leave you vulnerable.

The combat still looks as good as it did in the original game, and the fact that it's all close quarters means that rounds are likely to keep going until the playable circle gets very small indeed—skip to 1:16 for an example of a tight final battleground. You can also see a decent flyover of the entire map at 0:51.

Battlerite Royale will cost $19.99 in Early Access, where it will remain for six months. When it launches for real, it'll be free-to-play, but you might have to pay for extra champions (Stunlock is still working out the details). It's fully-playable at the moment, and all the champions from Battlerite have been reworked to make sure they're suited to the battle royale setting.

During Early Access, Stunlock will add new maps, weapons and champions, it said.

Existing owners of Battlerite will get some battle royale bonuses, too.

Check out the Steam page here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.