Bored of Warzone or Apex Legends? You can now play Ubisoft’s battle royale Hyper Scape on PC

Open beta has begun, with a dollop of new content added

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Hyper Scape, Ubisoft’s new contender for thebest battle royalegame, is now available for PC gamers to download and play in open beta.

Following a new gameplay trailer which was showcased in the Ubisoft Forward event, the open beta of the futuristic shooter – which is kind of like a streamlined and stripped-downApex Legendswith even more emphasis on mobility, and some interesting extra touches – has been unleashed.

The Hyper Scape beta comes with four game modes. Crown Rush Squad is the main game, with the winner being the last team standing, except you can also take an alternative route to victory by keeping hold of a crown that appears in the late game. Crown Rush Solo is the same except players aren’t in squads, but are playing as lone wolves.

Ubisoftnotesthat two ‘limited time’ modes will be appearing soon – Hack Runner Squad and Turbo Mode Squad – but doesn’t give any info as to exactly what these will be yet. Furthermore, a new weapon and hack have been added to the game for the open beta.

Royale twists

Hyper Scape has some interesting different twists on battle royale, as mentioned, including a fresh mechanic for how the battlefield – a virtual city, an urban environment offering towering heights and jump pads – closes in, with sections of the map simply disappearing and buildings slowly phasing out of existence in the virtual world.

And there’s a whole additional social mechanic whereby viewers on Twitch can trigger different events in the game, like low gravity, or haste, which increases the speed at which the game plays.

All this happens via the CrownCast Twitch extension, with extra features like streamers having the ability to directly invite viewers to play in their squad, which is pretty nifty. Watching streamed games can also progress your battle pass, too, further rewarding spectators.

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Of course, the best way to get an idea of what Hyper Scape is all about is to just give it a spin yourself, which you can now do. Download the open betahere, and meanwhile check out the latest gameplay trailer above.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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