Rapture Rejects Preview

In the beginning, God created Earth. A world of pristine beauty and perfection. And then… He fucked it all up.
Galvanic Games 4:20 New Dank Edition

Most of you reading this review have likely heard of Cyanide & Happiness (C&H). Its unique art style and own brand of dark, often controversial, humour was first published in 2005. Since then, Explosm, the creators of C&H, have partnered with Galvanic Games to create – you guessed it – a battle royale. A pretty enjoyable one at that, surprisingly.

Rapture Rejects retains everything that you would expect from C&H. The art style works well, making it nice and easy to run for most and generally very clean looking. It employs an isometric top-down perspective, which can get a little disorientating if you press Q or E (which I kept pressing accidentally, perhaps I need to work on my fingering…) as it shifts the camera around at 90 degrees, so you can view buildings or other objects from all angles.

It follows the usual tropes of battle royales, with small differences. At the beginning of the round, there are unlimited respawns for all players. You see, the aim of the game is to find a golden ticket to let you into Heaven. As the quote at the top says, God has fucked up his new world by creating people. In order to please, you need to kill everyone else and hold onto this ticket to be taken into His arms, and live forever.

After a player finds this ticket to ride…sorry, ticket for eternal life, Armageddon begins and respawns are disabled. It usually takes a good few minutes for someone to find the ticket, giving you enough chance to wander around the map, enclosed by lava, scavenging for weapons and other items. Mostly, these are kept in chests that you can press E to unlock. These aren’t typical SCAR’s or AK47s, instead there are knife shooters, garbage launchers and gumball catapults, to name but a few. Whoever does hold the ticket will have their location announced for all to see.

There are a couple of other special items as well, such as the F-Bomb which will utter a giant “FUCK” as it explodes. Bandages, chicken dinners, alcohol and drugs also help you get your health back after a fight to the death with another player. Speaking of fighting, the combat is fairly challenging, without being too frustrating. It definitely feels satisfying when you do manage to kill another player, and steal all of their loot.

Unfortunately, most of the assault tends to be towards the end of the matches as the ring of fire draws closer. Up to 50 players are supported, but that is very difficult to hit with an average concurrent player base of 14 in the past 30 days. It does mean it’s easier to earn tickets though. You can use these to buy cosmetic items for your character, which is fully customisable. The cheapest item is 75 tickets, and after about 10 games I had 417 tickets (after spending 100 on a random item draw), after winning three matches.

Of course, as you’d expect you can purchase these tickets yourself. I’m thankful that it’s only cosmetics that can be unlocked this way, and no early access to weapons or anything of the sort.

I’m not known for being a battle royale fan, but I do actually enjoy this game. The biggest issue it has is a lack of players, and whilst I’d really like to recommend you to go out and buy this game, I’m held back from that by the asking price. For a game that doesn’t have anything else to offer outside this game mode (there is a doubles option, but I could never find a game), £16 is steep. Particularly for a game still in Early Access.

Hopefully there is an influx of users at some point, because this could be a fantastic take on the genre.

Rapture Rejects is slated to leave Early Access in early 2020 on PC. Other platforms are not in the pipeline at this time.