Since the entirety of H1Z1’s design is predicated off of ramping up the action, the looting of the countryside is greatly compressed relative to most battle royale games. The circle in H1Z1 shrinks slowly over the course of the match, just as you’d expect, except here the threat you’re avoiding is depicted as deadly poisonous gas instead of an electric force field. The first all about looting and getting to the circle, if you aren’t already in it. Once on the ground, in my experience, a match of H1Z1 consists of three phases. In February 2016, the original zombie-focused H1Z1 was renamed as Just Survive, and in August 2017, King of the Kill was renamed back to H1Z1, and finally launched out of early access on February 28, 2018. A few months later it added a tense battle royale multiplayer mode known as King of the Kill, which proved so popular it was spun out into its own separate Early Access game. Originally, H1Z1 debuted on Steam Early Access in 2015 as a hardcore zombie survival game inspired directly by the popular ARMA 2 mod, DayZ. Most teams end up picking the same handful of popular spots regardless of the safe zone and just drive to the zone once they find a vehicle. (In PUBG, by contrast, the plane’s path and the circle’s placement is random, and you only get to pick when you drop.) Picking where to go makes the drop feel more strategic, but removes a lot of the impromptu strategy involved with random drop spots, and that makes them feel more routine.

For example, at the very start of each match teams pick which region of the map to drop down to, and as areas become more populated they’ll start to glow yellow, orange, and eventually red, giving you the ability to determine how much of a firefight you want to immediately land in. H1Z1 tries to fill that void with fast-paced action, but isn’t entirely successful. That lack of commitment to a signature look and style often leaves an empty feeling, even if it does have the benefit of being a more accessible battle royale as a result. You can’t attach scopes and quick-draw magazines to your rifles and there are no sky bases or mile-high sniper towers to be found in this one. Where contemporaries PUBG and Fortnite define themselves by aiming for a realistic feel and zany base-building shenanigans, respectively, H1Z1 floats somewhere in the middle. H1Z1 is actually a refreshingly simple game in a lot of ways when all is said and done.

In a genre now dominated by Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, this battle royale struggles to find its own identity despite predating both – with the most promising spark of inspiration coming from an inventive new destruction derby-style mode. Sometimes that’s the good kind that leads to great moments of action, and sometimes it’s the disorganized and directionless kind that leads to boredom. In between the very start of an H1Z1 match – in which up to 150 people parachute down onto a small and continually shrinking map – and the final moments laced with exploding crossbow bolts, it’s utter chaos.

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