As much as I'd like to hold my standards up as a sophist and tastemaker of the Garts (game arts), the fact of the matter is that a cheap trick and lack of price tag can get me through the door and into the trough pretty easily. Enter Splitgate, an open game beta whose design document and elevator pitch practically locked fingers and skipped off into the war-scorched skybox lining its horizon.

Though let's be real, if you are of the Halo generation and, like me, mysteriously developed the aptitude for this style of ambling arena shooter by simply being 13 at the correct time, "Halo mixed with Portal" hits with a certain immediacy. Those with eyes in the audience may glean just how vital is was to the devs of Splitgate to crib Bungie's particular brand of gunplay, down to the arsenal having a big laser that takes a second of charging to fire. Like I said: cheap tricks - if you just want to play Halo multiplayer without paying for it, this honestly isn't that bad of an option in that "flash game recreation of Worms" kinda way.

But hey, that's not what we're here for! We saw a random Twitter video of someone wiping a team by firing through a portal blindly, right? Unfortunately, it's not as brash as the elevator pitch has you think. Each of the maps have specific blue walls which accept your portals and like, I GET IT, it's "tactical" and "balanced" but it's also not the clownshow I was hoping for! However, one very specific mechanic of the portals ends up making them work for me: even if you see a tiny sliver of a blue wall, firing a portal there will stick, congruity be damned. What this means is that your aim and map awareness have to be perfect constantly - not just in combat, but even when navigating. Once you get the feel for it, you can be incredibly oppressive in your map presence in a way that almost completely erases that aforementioned Halo sluggishness (plus you can physics-problem your way through portals at lightning speed, too! If this game didn't have that, I would've refunded it).

All that said, I'm probably done playing this for now though? I managed to ignore it up to this point, but Splitgate may be the absolute nadir of F2P visual taste. They're trying to monetize the most basic bitch UE4 aesthetic, and folks: it is clear that someone on this team calls their computer a "rig". It is littered with markings of the genre, and I'm growing tired of shaking the ick off of me every time I exit this game, especially with the added layer of "Razer RGB keyboard" blinding me. That said, I see the appeal and don't blame anyone for taking to it. It may be exactly what it sets out to be, but hey, it's exactly what it sets out to be.

A breath of fresh air in an era where deathmatch shooters feel all but dead. Splitgate is a very simple pitch of "Halo + Portal", and it delivers on that concept well. For me at least it was a bit of a slow start. I played this a year or two back in beta and it didn't stick with me. Now it's released? Maybe? Still sort of feels like a beta in some ways but that's getting into semantics, it's very playable currently and is being actively developed.

I didn't have a moment where I clicked with this game, and wasn't in love with it from the start. If you go in expecting Halo, and the game seems to really want you to feel that way, everything feels slightly off. The weapons handle just a bit differently, time to kill is faster, getting around the maps feels weird until you get used to using portals properly. None of this is bad though, and is more just a learning curve to get past. I kept playing just because it was easy to pick up for a short session, and now that I've been playing daily for a few weeks I really like it.

The map selection is one of my only real complaints, it's not terribly small but it could definitely use more variety, and some of the maps currently aren't great. The most successful ones are the ones basically ripped from Halo with minor adjustments, honestly though I just want more of those. As unoriginal as they are, they're just the most fun. This is a problem I believe will get better with time at least.

This is a really fun game overall right now, but I feel like its longevity depends a lot on the updates it gets down the road, it seems on a good path though. I'll likely keep playing this over any of the big AAA shooters this year. I don't think I've been this into a free-to-play shooter since Blacklight Retribution, hopefully it has a better future than that did.

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KGBESY

The idea of combining Halo and Portal is such an interesting concept, but is it pulled off well here? Yeah it'd say it's done quite well here. The gunplay is fine and it's a fun game but it certainly has it's issues. The most fun part of the game is also the worst part with that being the portals. They are very fun when used well but there is a lack of places you can actually use them which kinda sucks. The different game modes are fun as well they're not something that hasn't been done better elsewhere. However I would very much recommend this as it is so fun. As I said before the portals are easily the best part of the game and when you pull off a really smart play you feel like a genius