Theorycraft Games’ Supervive was my favourite game of 2024. I had an absolute blast playing it for a couple of hundred hours within the first few weeks of release, making a bunch of friends that I still play with to this day. To those unfamiliar, Supervive is a battle royale with MOBA elements. It plays more like League Of Legends than Apex Legends, but fuses the two genres together in a way that is satisfyingly unique. The movement mechanics are excellent, resulting in dances with death over the huge abyss, leading to some amazing outplay potential.
Tthe gameplay loop is straightforward enough that you can get a good idea of what you’re doing within just a few hours. You land, kill mobs for experience, then complete a number of objectives across the map – such as Vaults – for better items. Your character levels up and upgrades gear as they go. Combat is fast-paced and frenetic, but with good team play some fights can last for several minutes. These drawn-out engagements are by far the best bit of Supervive.
The biggest problem at the moment is, sadly, the lack of players. Lobbies are made up mostly of bots, which means you do manage to get into games fairly quickly, but when the AI merely runs at you without even attempting to fight back properly, it sorta ruins the vibes, you know?
Where Is Everyone?
Supervive peaked at its early access launch with 47,000 players, and now has just 2,000. I know gamers can sometimes get too fixated on player numbers, but to see this much of a significant dropover only a few months is worrying. I also understand that the game is still in early access and undergoing updates that fundamentally alter the way it plays. There was a little ripple in the community last month when Theorycraft changed the default queue size from four players to three. This obviously upset some people, especially those who’d formed a solid four-player squad since launch.
And yet, even with these tweaks and changes, it’s such a good game that I can’t fathom why the peak concurrent players have dropped to around 2,000. I definitely play a lot less than I used to, but I still jump in every now and then – particularly if there’s a new update, which there have been several of since the game went into early access at the end of last year. The small community is still robust and the Discord is pretty active. But there’s no influx of new players.
The lack of players could be because the game is fairly niche. People hear “battle royale” or “MOBA” and just tune out. That’s a bit unfair to Supervive, because it’s technically a game that doesn’t fall into either genre. Its unique mechanics are matched by unique character design: often with these types of games the characters are always sort of uncanny, and while Supervive does have an archer character which can only ever make me think of LoL’s Ashe, most of them are well-thought-out and different. The whole game is different.
Supervive also had a difficult launch window. Path Of Exile 2 was released within the same week of the open beta launch, which means quite a few players may have played a few rounds of Supervive before jumping into PoE. Update cadence was fairly slow at the start, and there was a lack of progression that didn’t get people coming back for more. These issues have largely been addressed with a few months of updates, but the game still isn’t quite there yet.
I think Supervive will eventually get its time in the sun when 1.0 releases, which has a vague timeframe of summer 2025. I’m assuming there will be a big marketing push across Twitch, getting some big streamers on a sponsorship deal to get the game out there. Once you start to get to grips with the mechanics, there really isn’t another game on the market quite like Supervive, and it deserves another shot.
Supervive
- Released
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2024
- Developer(s)
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Theorycraft Games
- Publisher(s)
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Theorycraft Games
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
