H1Z1: King of the Kill gamescom Preview

There's a bit of a complex story to this one. King of the Kill(KotK) was a mode of play within the game H1Z1. It turned out that a great deal of players were enjoying this mode more than the main "walking simulator with zombies" mode, so the game was split into two separate projects. The original game is now known as H1Z1: Just Survive and the KotK mode became Z1 Battle Royale.

It's a move that has worked out well for Daybreak Games, as they've been able to focus their resources on the more popular title. At the time of writing, this game was pulling in a 30 day average of 18,159 players compared to H1Z1: Just Survive's 2,294. That's more than five times the player base!

Unlike its namesake, H1Z1: King of the Kill is not a survival fight against zombies, but in fact against 149 other players. It's a free for all that sees players aim to be the last one standing in what is a ridiculously massive map. Seriously, this thing is huge, and I suppose it has to be if you’re having 150 strong death matches.

You get spawned at random location with no weapons and your first task is to go and find things to aid your survival. I was quite lucky and spawned near a house that had some decent weapons in, and the game tries to put you always near somewhere that gives you a fighting chance, but I can see this being a "your mileage may vary" situation depending on where you get dropped.

One thing that I felt was worth mentioning was the lobby. It’s rare to find a situation where the lobby is a place that’s worth talking about in a preview, but some work has gone into the lobby for this title. The lobby is fully animated, with everyone appearing as their character in a very small arena. One end shows leaderboards, with players’ scored being shown for all to see in a manner similar to old fashioned train announcement boards. The characters are controllable in here too, but also invincible. This means that as you’re waiting, everyone can pummel each other around for the fun of it. It was quite fun and meant that I wasn’t too concerned that it took a few minutes to get enough players for a match.

The graphics aren’t terrible, but aren’t great either. They do what they need to do, and considering the scale of the game, it would probably be unrealistic to expect it to be too high end, especially considering this is a multiplayer game and smoothness is the key. The variety of terrain helps. There’s caves, valleys and hills, rivers, houses and all manner of different places to explore. The fact that you know that around each corner someone could be waiting to blow your brains out adds a degree of tension. Is it worth exploring that abandoned looking cottage or should you hide out by the door in case there’s someone in there?

It’s that scale and sense of anything being able to happen that makes the game what it is. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original H1Z1, but this game makes me feel how that game should have done. It’s a sense of dread that you normally only get with horror games. At any moment, another player could pop round the corner and ruin all the hard work you’ve done in staying alive up until this point, and you have no way of predicting it so you are always slightly on edge.

The game as I saw it was very polished, but the one thing that reminded me it was an Early Access title was the lack of explanations. There’s no tutorial yet, no instructions or tooltips, you’re just parachuted in and left to your own devices. If I didn’t have a PR agent telling me how to play as I went, I probably would have struggled. Once you know what you’re doing though, it’s good fun, and should play out differently each time you play due to the sheer randomness everything within.

We don’t have a release date just yet, but the game is available to all on Early Access. Expect to see a full PC release followed by console versions in 2017.