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When this game came out, in 2023, I legitimately thought it had a chance to stand among the best multiplayer games of all time.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure about that. But I would still count it as among the best of the decade, at least.

Let's look at the broad picture. As you might gather from the name, the banner art, the presentation in general, and the gameplay, BattleBit Remastered is essentially a demake reverse-engineering of the Battlefield series, rendered in blocky voxel form for performance and development practicality reasons, creating an aesthetic somewhere between charming simplicity and brutalist functionality that surrounds an incredibly tight core of weighty-feeling gunplay, snappy movement, extensive building destruction, combined arms vehicular warfare, and explosive, overwhelming, multi-level firefights. And, when it comes down to brass tax— it does that really, really well.

The basic gameplay and moment-to-moment experience of BattleBit is, rough edges of its ramshackle small-team development aside, just damned fun. It's smooth, it's approachable, it's got surprising depth, it's got lots of neat little interlocking systems that come together to make really exciting emergent moments all the time, it's got proximity chat and community servers that can make for tight-knit, friendly, genuinely hilarious experiences, and, particularly if you aren't as particular about the sound effects as the not-insubstantial crowd who were turned off by the recent audio update (I am not a member of this group, but I get it, more on that later), a lot of the omnipresent audiovisual feedback is *just* good enough for it all to come together in your head and be surprisingly immersive (and addictive).

That's why I got up at 6 in the morning on Saturdays or pulled all-nighters just to play the European-aligned playtests on PST hours, week after week after week, and racked up hundreds of hours in it alone. That's why I started a clan for one of my other internet hangouts and managed it, that's why I bickered with community server owners for hours and shot the ♥♥♥♥ with Oki and sprinted around every map in the game 1,000,000 times blasting UGK and Funkadelic and Bolt Thrower over the mic. For a long while, I'd just log in every day and jam out session after session after session, bombing people with drones and sniping on rocky cliff-faces and charging through doorways with bullet-hose SMGs and shooting the ♥♥♥♥ with everyone from Ukrainians to boomers to Twitch streamers to furries to communists to Evangelical Christians— and I was always just as excited for the next, because there was just still *more stuff to do*, more weapons to master, more attachments and camos to grind out, more kills to rack up, more of those sweet, sweet, crunchy hitmarker noises to ingrain into my subconscious—

— and then, finally, after months and months of banging out match after match, life happened, and I finally got *bored*. And, more importantly, it feels like the developers started... sputtering. And to contextualize what I mean by that, I'm going to step back, a little bit, and overview some of the history of this game's release, why it got so popular when it did, and why it seems to have been a flash in the pan.

BattleBit was a troublesome project to get out to the public, and while I'm not going to pretend I even know the full story, let alone want to attempt to summarize or reproduce it here, it was a process that took a fair number of years, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and a lot of revisions to get to the state it's in now. This, by itself, is not a bad thing, not at all, and, especially in the initial rush of the game's release, it seemed like a *great* thing.

Battle*field* has been struggling, as of late, as have a lot of multiplayer shooters, particularly in the eyes of multiple demographics of the game-playing public— gen Xers and boomers, people with full-time jobs or educations or families that pull them away from the constant churn-and-burn of ranked-ladder-obsessed battle-pass-and-microtransaction-filled FOMO-abusing live-service Lifestyles, old Source dwellers looking for a new server browser to hop around, tac-shooter and milsim players left smarting from a few recent failures and downturns in other games who were open to a new, if unconventional, entrant into the periphery of the genre— who are not particularly well-served by any of Battlefield's *competitors*, on fundamental or implementation levels that are too widespread for these games to really course correct. BattleBit, when it started to attract eyes and attention, was a breath of *fresh air*; here was a game that wasn't rushed out the door to meet a financial year deadline and designed by seven committees to maximize shareholder dividends this quarter, but forged, over the course of nearly a decade, by a !!!three!!!-man team of Real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who were just as ticked off about the state of the shooter genre as we all were, with the express intent to go back to the basics that made influences like Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, MW2 (2009), the original Insurgency, and so on beloved enough to kick off franchises, break sales records, and define more or less the shape of an entire generation of games, not just other shooters but across the spectrum of genres and design trends, in both technical and artistic senses.

More importantly, when push came to shove and people started getting their hands on it— it DELIVERED. Sure, it was very rough around the edges, but shooting block dudes just felt So ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Good and moving around these complex urban environments with 126 other wild-eyed rip-roaring jarheads felt *invigorating*; the voice chat, discovered to go across team lines and limited solely by proximity, volume, and ability to distinguish oneself from the cacophony of gunfire, bombs, treads, tires, and death screams, turned what could've been frustrating, abrasive gameplay nuances and an extremely brutal learning curve between sweat-soaked bloodshot-eyed ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ randoms into a near-constant BYOB party, and, most importantly of ALL, it just WORKED. No stupid overwrought overcomplicated interface mangled in 18 places per screen just to sell you garbage you don't want or need, no botched matchmaking system with bizarre rank gap considerations and a clear bias towards trying to manipulate your dopamine systems, no battle pass, no needless filler, no elo number for keyboard warriors to compare e-peens over, excellent optimization; if you were willing to forgive server hiccups and the occasional (mostly funny rather than frustrating) obvious bug, then you had one of the best, most replayable, most engrossing $15 packages put together in multiplayer gaming in *years*.

... and then the devs could NOT figure out what to do with it. It's a mixture of things— not having the manpower and resources to capitalize with more content when the iron was at its hottest, early stumbles in community server management and rule enforcement that let cheaters slip by with temporary bans from time to time and took an uncomfortably long time to spin up racist removal, and some simply baffling post-launch design decisions— that all came together to rob the game of most of its momentum and a large chunk of its initial playerbase, far more than what can simply be attributed to the ending of a hype train or casual-gamer migration waves. It's currently stuck in patch limbo, now, waiting for a massive update that has been teased, delayed, and stuck on an indeterminate deadline for months, now, with most of the pessimistic playerbase just trying to keep their heads down and the servers full.

... but, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, no other game has made me enjoy shooting block dudes this much. I hope it lives, I really do, and I hope it /thrives/. Many other modern games could stand to learn a lot of lessons from it. It just needs a /lot/ more love. But, hey— it's only $15. What's the worst that could happen from giving it a shot?

turbo cluster♥♥♥♥ sourcemod deathmatch the old way, not recommended for wimps

You don't need to play much of this to know it's special-- a new, F2P shooter, not just reviving arena gameplay but doing it properly, with an easy to use dedicated server hosting system and a dev who legitimately knows what the ♥♥♥♥ they're doing, AND it has a steady international playerbase?

This ♥♥♥♥ bussin' on Jah.

Honestly, speaking as someone who was into Homestuck for a while but fell off in the Epilogues and aftermath-- I just can't currently recommend it. I can see the idea, the intent, and in many places it's SO close, it's just BARELY short of making it-- but then the game bugs out again. The props become invisible for my co-op partner. The lobby breaks. I encounter another completely unintuitive mechanic that just stops me dead in my tracks and makes me feel like everything I was doing before was just kind of undirected aimless wasted time. They provide a manual, but while the style of it is excellently executed as far as the art and personality and humor goes, the condescending snark typical of Hussie's writing just comes off empty and unpleasant when you're left with the rest of the game just killing the initial momentum into a wet thud.

It's just-- really, really undercooked. It runs well, it runs well on a variety of systems and configurations, but the game design just-- isn't there yet, and it's really kind of not even ready for public release when the impression is this /draining/ and this /noxious/. The game's going to have its life and momentum sucked out during Early Access, and then no big update can undo the downward spiral. Please, guys, don't make the same mistakes as everyone else in this fandom, learn from Hussie's failures, learn from What Pumpkin-- step back. Reevaluate. There's an amazing game in here, but it's so uncut and so unrefined that trying to pass it off the world as a work-in-progress wedding ring is going to make people write it off forever as garbage.

I really can't currently recommend it at its current state of optimization unless you have an uber-beefy rig... and, honestly, even then, it probably still won't run very well. I love the concept, and I think it has amazing potential as a fun gory screw-around sandbox, and I really hope Mantalice is able to continue working on it and fix its optimization issues.

this game was bad back in the day and it's bad now

good game, mediocre community, trade system will either make you hate the game or make you love the game, learning cliff with many mechanics that are sometimes difficult to learn, high time investment required

♥♥♥♥ this game