My Hero Academia Ultra Rumble is a free to play battle royale game set in the world of the hit anime series My Hero Academia, developed by Byking Inc. and published by Bandai Namco entertainment. In this review we will be covering the game’s various gameplay elements, graphical qualities, and server proficiency. However, the information used in this review was gathered from the open beta from held over May 25th to June 2nd, no date for the game’s full release is confirmed, so some of the features reviewed in this article may be subject to change.
Gameplay
My Hero Ultra Rumble is your standard “choose your hero” battle royale, albeit at a much smaller scale, with only about 8 teams of 3 per match, and a fairly small map, personally I find this to be a good thing, it ensures the matches go quickly and it makes getting around a lot easier so you aren’t spending half of the match exclusively avoiding the giant death ring closing in on you.
However, this does make any fights started quite easy to spot, which will usually, but, not always, turn what would be a simple fight between two teams into what is essentially a dust cloud brawl, the likes of which can only be found in old cartoons, encompassing almost the entire lobby of players, until the end of the match.
The game also features destructible environments, which is always a fun feature for games to have, in fact a surprising amount of the environments are destructible, some of which are much easier to tell are destroyable than others, I learned this this the hard way when the large partially collapsed building I was looting the top of was suddenly fully brought down by an enemy team.
One thing the game does much differently than other battle royales is that when you’re downed but not fully dead after a 20 second timer your character will just automatically pick themselves back up (your teammates can still help you up of course) this is a change that I actually really like, it promotes a sense of urgency to finish what you’ve already started so it doesn’t come back to haunt you while trying to manage what’s currently coming after you, even your whole team is downed you as long as one of you manages to hide a comeback is still possible, which I find very fitting for the series the game takes place in.
The main gameplay loop is your standard battle royale affair, when not in a fight you go around looting, as well as saving (or threatening if you’re playing a villain) random civilians caught in the crossfire to get items to respawn your fallen teammates, but aside from that, you’ll looking for healing items and things to upgrade your arsenal, however in this game you don’t have guns, at least not in a conventional sense (yet), what you’re trying to upgrade is your characters 3 main abilities, you do this by finding colourful cards hidden in chests across the world, or on bodies of dead players, which could either be a rainbow card allowing you to freely upgrade whichever skill you wish or cards with set colours that will only raise a predetermined skill as long as it’s colour coincides with your character’s typing (don’t worry we’ll get into that soon).
You’ll mainly be finding the cards with the predetermined colour, which if it isn’t of matching colour will turn the card into a stat boosting item for your character increasing their attack, defence, speed, recharge speed, or give an AoE heal bubble depending on their colour for a set time, which is good because you’ll be mainly finding cards that are either not useful to anyone on your team, or cards that exclusively useful to only one person on your team, making the team dynamic consist of two fairly shrimpy player that will probably need to play cautiously and one super juiced up player who has gone a bit power mad and will probably try to solo the whole lobby, leaving the shrimpy teammates to scramble to try to provide backup for said juiced player against a team with the exact same dynamic.
Characters
In My Hero Ultra Rumble you play as the iconic characters of the series, each with their own unique abilities.
The characters are split into 5 different classes, those being:
Strikers: dps characters capable of doing heavy damage,
Assault: defensive characters suited for drawing attention away from your teammates
Rapid: fast characters good for getting in landing quick hits on enemies and getting out just as fast,
Support: good for providing a distractions against enemies giving your teammates time to heal, And
Technical: trap based characters that require a bit more thought to be fully utilized.
The game does a good job of making the characters feel distinct from each other, some feeling better to play at mid to long range and others being far better suited for close range encounters, while also keeping them easy to just pick up and play, encouraging trying out different team combos.
While the game does open avenues for decent synergy, most of the time it feels like you’re just three characters doing their own thing at the enemy and it just works, the main reason you’ll be playing the different classes is to provide your team with different class passives, you see each class comes with a stat buffing passive, very much like the non-type matching cards with the one exception being the support passive going from its AoE heal field card to just boosting health recovery item effectiveness, which is hardly even noticeable!
If there’s one gripe, I have with the character typing system it’s that the support typing feels sort of useless. I mean sure the characters in that type are fun, but they could probably just be switched over to the technical category and no one would bat an eye. Every character role is well defined in its abilities and gameplay except for the support role, I even struggled to come up with a way to explain the class while writing this review!
Controls
Not much to say here, the controls feel a bit clunky at first, but you’ll very shortly get used to them, the only problem I’m having with them is that I can’t seem to get the hang of is the climbing mechanic, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to climb a wall to escape an enemy and accidentally end up jumping into the middle of all three members of an enemy team
Monetization
And now it’s time for the giant ugly elephant in the room! Since it is a free to play game, it should be apparent that there will be monetization, included in the open beta is a gacha system and a battle pass, there are no micro-transactions in the open beta or disclosed pricings yet, thankfully but it is very apparent that they will be added in the full release.
First off is the battle pass, it only goes up 50 ranks and is relatively easy to complete I was at the end of it after only 2 days' worth of gameplay, all that’s included in it are handfuls of the free in game currency, some rolls for the game’s gacha system, and some voice lines and cosmetics so nothing of real note, aside from the fact that the final reward for it is a costume for the main character Deku that I am fully convinced is just default outfit with no changes done to it whatsoever so it’s a bit of an incredibly lacklustre final reward, hopefully they change that in the full release.
As for the gacha aspect, (for those who don’t know a gacha is in essence a loot box) the main things you’ll be getting are outfits, voice lines for characters, and emotes, most of which feel pretty generic. Most of the outfits are simply palette swaps, with only the rarer ones actually changing the outfit, sometimes slightly, sometimes extremely, depending on the rarity.
The only part I’m iffy on is that as of the open beta the gacha system is the only way to unlock the characters, thankfully this is slightly lessened by the fact that you’re rolling for character unlock tickets instead of the characters themselves, but i do hope upon full release that there are alternative ways to unlock characters, only because not everyone has good gacha game luck.
Graphics
The game does a very good job at capturing the art style of the series, every character looks on model making it very easy for you to tell who you are fighting, however at times with all the flashy “quirks” going of consecutively it can be hard to tell what is going on at times, making the all the more chaotic.
During the time I played My Hero Ultra Rumble I noticed no major graphical errors, or clipping, the only thing I have to gripe about is some of the animations used during gameplay, they aren’t very smooth and the characters all just snap into them, this is particularly noticeable in the animation for finishing a downed opponent, these animations could use a bit more work, as I would say they are the roughest animations in the game.
What usually happens in these animations is the camera would snap close to the player character, the character would then snap into a quick showcase of their quirks or a pose, they would snap into a preparing to strike pose and then (for the only fluid part of the animation) would strike.
All in all aside for the end none of it is smooth and does detract a bit from the experience, and since the finishing mechanic is one of the easiest ways to defeat your opponent, you do end up seeing it a lot, so the animations are one of the things that should be focused on until the release proper.
Server Quality
This segment will be focusing on how the servers of the game feel, i.e., how fast it takes to find a match, if there’s any lag during the matches, and how common are server issues like random disconnections.
Like all other battle royale starting a match is quite simple simply hit a button on the home screen to be put in a queue, however right now the game is only playable in teams of three, so before you can be put into a lobby you have to be matched with two others which is relatively quick, not the fastest, but not terribly slow either, that is unless a person leaves mid player search, you will likely never find another person after the next person joins, it’s honestly faster to just close the game, restart it, and start the search over again, and when you do get all three players in a team, you then have to connect to a lobby took actually start a match.
This is usually where a majority of the waiting takes place, if I had to estimate how long it takes to connect to a lobby, I would say it takes at least 5 times the of time to find your other teammates. When you do connect to a lobby it usually doesn’t take that long for the match to start, Except for the times when you get thrown into an empty lobby just waiting for anyone else to join.
While this is seemingly a bit of an uncommon occurrence the wait times when this happens are unbearable. you will sometimes be able to connect to others and have a regular match, but most of the time what happens (at least what happens to me) is that after an excruciatingly long wait the game will just give up and fill the rest of the lobby up with bots, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if the ai wasn’t awful, making it lead to just a boring experience.
While I was playing My Hero Ultra Rumble the only time, I noticed any lag spikes or stutters of any kind was during the connection phases, where only the visuals would freeze for a second and then be fixed quite fast, during the actual gameplay it ran quite smoothly on my ps4 pro, and I encountered no minor issues that would impede my performance in-game.
However, I fairly often got disconnected randomly, there were no signs that anything was wrong, it would just suddenly disconnect at any time, whether mid match, or even on the home screen. One thing I did notice about most of the problems I was having is that they would become more frequent further on into the day, the game would be perfect earlier in the day, but all the flaws would become much more prominent in the evening, it could be because more people are coming on to the game, but I have no real theories on why it happens.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
Enjoyable gameplay
Everything is quick and easy to learn.
Characters have noticeably different playstyles.
Matches go by quite quick.
Easily traversable map
A lot of potential synergy between characters
Cons:
A bit hard to tell what is happening mid fight.
Stiff animations
Outfits are basically just palette swaps.
Long connection times/strange empty lobby purgatory
Random disconnections
Small map makes it easy to be spotted by others mid fight, leaving no real breathing room
Conclusion
Overall, My Hero Ultra Rumble is an incredibly fun game, when everything was working as it was supposed to. I did thoroughly enjoy it and I’m not even that partial to battle royale games! the game does definitely have its rough patches, some of which ranging from little nitpicks like the not very appealing costumes and voice lines, to more major gripes like the aforementioned empty lobby purgatory and random disconnects, but if you can manage looks past those issues you will find a free to play game with merit here, one of which I eagerly await the full release of.
And there you have my review of the My Hero Academia Ultra Rumble open beta, the release date of the full game has not yet been revealed so please keep in mind some of the aspects of this game being reviewed may be subject to change, so please keep an eye out for the games official release. Have any thoughts on the article or game itself?
Do you want to share anything you came across while you were playing the game? Then please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section down below.
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