Hands on with Splitgate 2, a slick love letter to the arena shooters of yore
8.21.2024
By Tom Regan, Contributor
Taking influence from classic arena shooters like Unreal Tournament, 1047 Games’ Splitgate 2’s frenetic alpha picks up exactly where 2019’s debut left off. Thanks to its refreshingly old-school ethos, Splitgate’s portal-hopping shooting swiftly made waves online, offering many FPS fans the back-to-basics arena shooter they craved. Co-Creator Ian Proulx says that he initially dreamed up the game's concept while studying at Stanford. “I missed Halo LAN parties and wanted to create the kind of old-school FPS that I’d been yearning for since I was a kid.”
Channeling the chaos of older shooters and wrapping it in shiny HD visuals, he put together a prototype to keep himself amused. “I didn’t think much of it until my friend and I ended up playing it for five hours straight.”
It turned out that the rest of the world was equally enamored. Splitgate went viral, with the one-time Stanford school project gaining a huge audience. Now, three years later, Proulx tells us that he’s managed to achieve what he always envisioned for the original Splitgate. “With the first game, we were definitely limited by the team size, but with Splitgate 2, I’ve made my dream game.”
Diving into a closed alpha for Splitgate 2, I’m taken off-guard by how immediately it delivers the goods. Unlike your first hour with many modern shooters, Splitgate 2 nixes the lengthy tutorials and vast map exploration and just serves up eight players, one arena, and maximum carnage. While the last game excelled in free-for-all deathmatches, this slicker sequel doubles down on team-based modes, injecting the modern FPS template with the frenzied fragging of past shooters.
This time around, your avatar feels far more agile. While the jetpack double jump makes a welcome return, as you glide between objectives, ducking and weaving out of laser fire, a newly added slide mechanic is the cherry on the fraggy cake, allowing skilled players to skid their way into a portal and ambush unsuspecting foes on the other side. The maps feel smaller here too, forcing teams to face each other early on.
The alpha featured two new game modes, Hotzone and Team Deathmatch. Hotzone is essentially a fun twist on your classic King of the Hill mode, where instead of the objective’s capture progress being measured individually, it’s shared between both teams, allowing you to swoop in at the last minute and completely ruin your opponent's day. Team deathmatch is largely what you expect, and both offered an enjoyably chaotic time as I randomly fragged around during my four-plus hours of playtesting.
There’s a newly added tactical layer this time around—player classes. While some may fear that this kind of complexity would take away from Splitgate’s winning simplicity, I’m pleasantly surprised by what these new elements add to the formula. As I launched into team deathmatches across Splitgate 2’s reflective sci-fi arenas, I began to appreciate the subtleties of each different class.
Aeros is the class for speedsters, allowing players to dart around the map with a giddying sense of mobility, shutting down portals with a Loki-like level of trickery. Meridian is the tactician's choice, armed with the ability to spot enemies through walls, a healing grenade, and the power to slow down time via a brilliantly infuriating area-of-effect ability. Last but not least is the classic bruiser Sabrask, who can deploy walls that only they can shoot through, while frantically ruining their opponent’s portal-hopping with a well-placed sticky grenade.
In a wise decision, each player's abilities are on short cooldowns, meaning that you can make the most of your powers each round. While you’ll still be sliding and jetpacking around, the addition of classes and their respective tweakable loadouts allows for a more customizable approach to matches than its predecessor.
Still, Splitgate 2 is not all about bending to modernization. In a loving nod to the competitive arena shooters of yore, each map features a pair of alluring power weapons lurking somewhere within. From a grin-inducing rocket launcher that can launch multiple projectiles simultaneously to an assault rifle that you can tear into two separate guns to dual-wield, these chaotic drops added a welcome layer of unpredictability to each match.
Splitgate 2 does away with the auto-aim correction that nearly every modern shooter applies to its aim-down-sights mode, replacing it with a zoom that makes shootouts feel even more frantic and furious. Players can now even override enemy portals with their own, ruining their unsuspecting foe’s handy shortcut.
Based on what I’ve played so far, Splitgate 2 is set to deliver yet another bullet-riddled love letter to the captivating arena shooters of the '90s and '00s. Yet while Splitgate’s simplicity may have ultimately affected its longevity, even in this early state, Splitgate 2’s clever refinement of its winning formula suggests a shooter that will keep players fragging for the long term.
Want to frag across portals for yourself? Pre-purchase Splitgate 2 now on the Epic Games Store.