PUBG New State Preview – Killing in the Name of

PlayerUknown’s Battle Ground has largely been a mystery to me. Sure, I’ve seen it being played, but I gravitated towards other entries in the genre and kind of forgot about it. PUBG New State marks a new beginning for the series and one that I won’t pass up on with the chance to get in early.

Following the traditional rules of the genre, one hundred players drop into a single battlefield and need to survive. Once you get killed, that’s it. Try again in a different match. PUBG New State promises to provide a superior battle royale experience on mobile. Set decades after the original game boasting better controls and a whole new way to enjoy the game.

Before booting up PUBG New State, I decided to play the original a bit to get a taste of the difference. From a gameplay perspective, there’s a lot here in terms of quality-of-life updates and refined systems.

The first significant difference is that New State had warning reticles over your cross-hairs. These alerted you to gunshots and footsteps. I found myself frequently using this when trying to survive and get the drop on an opponent.

This added feature alone makes this new experience more pick up and play. Given the size of the map and the significance of setting yourself up through exploration, shootouts are fast, but they’re infrequent. This allows you to breathe and answer a message or get a drink of water without too much pressure. This does compliment the mobile nature of this version, and I often ranked in the top 50 regardless of how much attention I was paying to the match.

The UI has been outfitted to feature all the essential buttons on the right-hand side. It does appear cluttered, but it was convenient to open my backpack and sort through it without needing to stop moving.

The graphics look good, but this does come with a few caveats. After playing a single round which was around thirty minutes, my phone was running hot. Along with that, my phone’s battery took a massive hit as I played. After my first match, I went from 90% to around 65%. Using a charger while playing caused the phone to feel even hotter, so I decided to play off the charger only. There were a few crashes, but I found that lowering the settings to medium limited this issue.

One feature that I ended up appreciating was the “Return to the Match” feature. New State keeps your place in the world and allows you to come back to the match when you get back. Go fast enough, and it’s basically like you never left. However, this was met with a few issues where I would sometimes get trapped in a void when returning. I could tell my character was still there but not loaded correctly, with no way to back out of the match. The only way to exit was by force quitting.

My PUBG New State experience had its ups and downs, but I didn’t expect to have this much fun with a mobile battle royale. There were some rather fun moments of gameplay during firefights that made me want to continue, if only to experience that again. I can now see the appeal of this series, and New State only delivers further through quality-of-life updates. While I can’t speak for the PUBG super fans out there, I can say that if you’ve been hesitant to jump into the series, PUBG New State might be a good place to start.

PUBG: New State comes to IOS and Android later this year