World Boss was a F2P First-Person Shooter Game by Playside (the developers of the isometric action game ‘Kill Knight’, the Warcraft 3 and Battle for Middle Earth inspired RTS game ‘Age of Darkness’ and the upcoming FPS ‘Mouse PI for Hire’). The game first released in October 2022 in Early Access, before officially launching in June 2023 and has now shutdown in late March 2026.
World Boss had a unique concept. Every match was a 14 player free-for-all experience, in which the most dominant player became the World Boss. That player had more health and shield than the rest and had to defend himself against all the other players. Those players had one goal, to hunt down the World Boss and hopefully become him.
At launch there were no additional goals or alternative gamemodes. This was a bit of a problem. Once players become World Boss, they quickly lost the motivation to play, since there wasn’t anything to do besides defending the title. Matches in World Boss had no real ending and were just constantly going on till the players quit from boredom. This also meant that matches could be pretty unbalanced. Players could level up constantly during the matches and unlock up to 25 different perks. Somebody entering a new match was therefore always at a disadvantage in the beginning against those players who had already unlocked a bunch of Perks for more health, stronger weapons or better movement abilities.
I also have to point out, that perks might have been a cool idea and allowed you a great variety of different setups, since you could choose between 4 random perks at every level up in a match. Matches however were way too hectic to properly choose perks during them. I never had time to even attempt to actually read the descriptions for them while I was already shot again from other players. I often found myself with 3-5 different level ups and only a handful of seconds to chose them. A cool concept, but not a great execution.
It took the developers nearly a year after launch till they actually gave players a real endgoal besides just being the World Boss. If you killed enough players as a World Boss, you got the chance to contaminate parts of the map via nuclear containers, while all other players had to stop the World Boss from doing so. If the World Boss succeeded, the matches would now actually end instead of just going on forever. While previously a lot of players just ignored the World Boss due to his superior stats, they now had an incentive to actually team up against him, which mad it far from easy for the World Boss to win.
This was actually an improvement, but I am afraid it came too late. At this point the playerbase had already shrunk to a daily player peak of around 100 and didn’t manage to ever recover. A big reason for this was also the bad launch state of World Boss. Most players experienced performance issues and frequent game crashes. Those crashes were even more annoying since they only patched in reconnect options with the endgoal update. Not many players had the patience to try to become World Boss, if frequent crashes could immediately wipe all progress.
Let’s also take a short moment to talk about the actual Gameplay of World Boss. I think it can be best described as decent. I heard some people even comparing it to Mobile Games (probably also because of the cartoonish visuals). I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but it’s safe to say, that World Boss was no AAA Game. I liked the fast pace, but I don’t think movement or gunplay felt as snap on and fluent as they do in the best games. It wasn’t bad, but it was also certainly no Apex Legends or Call of Duty. Apart from the whole free-for-all gamemode, the gameplay probably contributed to this game being very chaotic. It was enjoyable, but I could never have seen World Boss as go-to game for me. A single gamemode and only 1-2 maps also showed an enormous lack of content in the game.
Playside tried to compensate the lack of gameplay content with the amount of cosmetic content added to the game. This combination obviously also rubbed people the wrong way. There were plenty of skins available in the shop and even a Battle Pass at some point. I have even heard people accusing the game of stealing skins from Fortnite. While there were some similarities between a couple of those, I think the accusation is a bit far-fetched.
Another point of controversy was the involvement of the two Streamers ‘Lazerbeam’ and ‘Fresh’ with the development of World Boss. Both were apparently very involved in consulting for the game during the development process, similar to Shroud of ‘Spectre Divide’ and Asmongold for ‘Rumble Club’. Same as Shroud with Spectre Divide however, they both played and promoted their game for one week and then never mentioned it ever again. It does make people wonder, if this is Lazerbeam’s and Fresh’s Game, why do they never even play their own game? While their big names might initially help to promote those products, there lack of enthusiasm or effort could also have a very negative signalling effect for players.
That being said, it was at least one of the better games actively promoted by steamers as their own game. Spectre Divide from Shroud was actually great and World Boss was at least somewhat good. Rumble Club from Asmongold was rather poor (I also reviewed it on this Blog: https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2024/05/rumble-club-pc-review.html); Deaddrop, the game from Dr. Disrespect, was so bad, it already got cancelled and Transience from Bigfry also looks absolutely awful. It’s especially funny how content creators like Asmongold and Bigfry are extremely critical of mediocre or sometimes even good games and yet they want to lure their fans into way worse games to exploit their personal popularity for monetary gain.
Result:
World Boss had a fresh and unique concept, which varied from the usual FPS gamemodes. A good concept however is not enough and the launch in Early Access left much to be desired. The developers did eventually fix the rough technical status and also gave the game a real purpose with the endgoal update, but by this point the playerbase had already abandoned the ship. It once again shows that too many developers sacrifice a good first impression in order to chase a quick buck in Early Access. I did enjoy World Boss for what it was, but without the interesting concept it would have probably only been a mediocre game.
6.5/10
