Bounty Game was a new Battle Royale game (full release in late December 2022), that could best be described as 'Squid Game' meets 'Alice in Wonderland', the Chinese version. Bounty Game was one of the BR games, that consists of multiple minigames in different rounds to eliminate more and more players each stage, till you find an ultimate survivor, similar to Fall Guys, Squid Game or Crab Game. The strongest source of inspiration was clearly Squid Game, from which Bounty game straight out ripped off multiple rounds. There was for example the famous green light, red light minigame, just with chess board pieces instead of lasers. The glass bridge from Squid Game was also present just with dices instead of glass and the default outfit of all characters was also suspiciously similar to that of the famous Netflix show.
The Alice in Wonderland influence showed itself in the absolute insanity of some of the minigames. Everything seemed extremely weird, but somehow still managed to develop an obscure charm. Golden bells, dices and poker chips played an important role in many of them. In one minigame you had to ride children carousel horses like bumper cars, one was a whack-a-mole round, in another one you had to platform on time wheels. There were a lot of platforming minigames, in which you had to jump on dices, or dodge lasers. Combat was also an important element in many minigames. Some would even allow you to use a gun, but most relied on melee weapons. Every player could choose for every minigame between 3 different weapons (a baseball bat, a pair of boxing gloves, or a pitchfork). The first two could knock opponents back and potentially into a pit, the pitchfork on the other hand could for a short time carry another player to possibly drop him off the map. There were also really obscure dodgeball and even tank minigames. In one Casino minigame you had to flip coins in arcade machines. I didn't even understand that one, but still managed to somehow qualify for the next round. Really cool was also a minigame, in which players were aligned in a circle and players took turns with a gun, that had half their bullets to be lethal and the other half to be blankets. That Russian roulette was a pretty fun idea.
It is just a shame, that movement and combat were not really the game's strongest aspects. Both felt pretty imprecise and delayed, but just stable enough to still be somewhat enjoyable. This unfortunately got worsened by the game's server problem. There was only one Chinese server, which meant western players had a massive Ping disadvantage. I got somewhat lucky with only 170ms, but even that is horrible in platform based levels. Without at least one European or Northamerican server it would have been difficult for Bounty Game to survive. The server structure was probably one of the main reasons for the lack of players. 10 players were required to start a match and 50 was the maximum. Since the F2P release we had been seeing massive drops in player numbers, which made it in very early 2023 already impossible at some parts of the day to even start a match. I was nonetheless shocked, that the game officially shutdown its servers without prior notice on the 4th of January 2023, not even 2 weeks after the F2P Full Launch of the game.
Let's take a short moment to talk about cosmetics in this game. You could unlock dollars and poker chips just through playing, but required a lot of them to even open a single cosmetic lootbox (massive grind to even open one lootbox and you get spamed with them). Skins could alternatively also be bought with chips, which you could also gather with real money. Pretty predatory monetization scheme, but nothing we wouldn't be expecting from a Chinese game and it is at least only effecting cosmetics.
Bounty Game got two different game modes. Free mode, which was free of charge and the only one really being played, or Standard mode, which cost an entrance fee of poker chips, but also gave a much bigger prize money to the winner. That being said I reached a Finale stage a couple of times, but it was always the same and I never came even close in completing it and neither did anybody in my lobby. Maybe I just got unlucky, but the finale stage required many difficult precise jumps and that proved to be impossible with my Ping.
Result:
Bounty Game is like an obscure Chinese rip-off of Squid Games. It manages to make Crab Game look like a serious and well structured alternative. Even though every minigame was rather odd and obscure, the game still developed a certain charm. Bounty Game was like watching an odd Asian television game show. You have no idea what is going and something like this would certainly not get released in your country, but it still looks entertaining enough, that you don't want to zip to another channel. Bounty Game was no masterpiece, but it might have been able to find a small niche for itself. The decision to exclusively use Chinese servers on the other hand sadly killed all potential the game had.
6/10
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