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
