Splitgate 2 Excels At Feeling Like Its Own Thing

It’s still a Halo-style arena shooter with portals, but what has surprised me most about Splitgate 2 is how much more there is to go with that idea. With its new iteration of the game, developer 1047 Games has dialed in elements that help build out the game’s identity, complementing what was already there with some new additions that help Splitgate 2 feel different from most other shooters on the market.

Ahead of its closed alpha, I played Splitgate 2 for about four hours, some of that with other members of the GameSpot crew to field a full squad of four. The preview we played wasn’t everything the game will have to offer, but it did provide a solid look at the way new elements are pairing with old ones from the original Splitgate to help give the sequel even more of a specific, unique identity.

As mentioned, the underlying idea is the same: Splitgate is a free-to-play competitive multiplayer first-person shooter where the arena is covered in special walls, and on those walls, you can place portals. Shoot a portal at one wall and another at a second wall and you create a gateway that lets you enter one and exit the other, instantly traveling across the map. You can also shoot through the portals and chase opponents through their portals, which leads to a ton of fun ideas and chaos among people who know how to use the portals effectively as part of their competitive strategy.

Not much has changed about the portal element in Splitgate 2, except that 1047 Games has simplified it. Firing a portal is now handled with a single button (rather than using two like the first game). Portals come in two colors–gold and purple–and in the original game, which color portal you fired was determined by its own button, requiring you to shoot both to create a complete pathway but allowing you to do things like “triple portal” by going halfway through one side of a portal and changing its exit by shooting the other to a new place. Splitgate 2 has a new “smart portal system” that does most of that thinking for you, so you can just tap one button and not have to think about the colors so much. Splitgate 2 still allows for closer control of your portals if you need it, and we didn’t do much triple portaling in our session to really test the system, but even our limited amount of messing with it suggested that the streamlined approach makes it a lot easier to do fun and ridiculous things with portals.

The underlying shooter mechanics are a bit on the Halo-ish side; there’s no aiming down sights, for instance, but just a short zoom for most weapons, and each arena spawns in power weapons like a rocket launcher or powerful submachine gun that can give one team a significant, if temporary, advantage over the other. The original Splitgate also had some sci-fi elements, like a jetpack that gives you a bit of short-lived verticality to complement your portal abilities.

Splitgate 2 works with all those underlying elements intact, avoiding messing too much with what already worked. Instead, the sequel fleshes out everything that’s not the core gunplay-and-portals idea. Movement is a little faster and more fluid, with more options like a slide ability. You can mod weapons to push one stat or another to match your specific playstyle or approach. And you can now use a light class system to give yourself a specialization on a team, like running-and-gunning or supporting your squad, to add a little variety to the way Splitgate 2 plays–without drastically altering the core feeling.

It’s in those class abilities that Splitgate 2 began to impress. I already liked the main idea of portaling around a map to get into fast and intense firefights, and seeing experts put portals to work alongside Splitgate 2’s slides, twitchy jumps, and jetpack bursts is always a bit dazzling. With the class abilities, alongside some adjustments to how game modes work, Splitgate 2 puts a greater emphasis on teamwork, while amplifying the game’s tendency to create standout moments and surprising plays. And even in our limited playtime, we saw quite a few of them.

Splitgate 2 sports three classes, referred to as factions in the game, that each have a slightly different focus. The Aeros faction focuses on fast movement and flanking, with a main, short-lived ability that boosts your health over max while increasing your movement speed, a stim that can heal you quickly after a fight, and a disc you can throw at opponents to stun and slow them so you can take advantage of your speed.

The Meridian faction mostly plays support, dropping either healing grenades or an area-of-effect dome that speeds up time for you and your team–quickening your fire rates, reload speed, and health regeneration–while slowing down time for your opponents. They also can fire off a wallhack ping that lets you see opponents through walls, which sounds overpowered until you recognize that players can and often are wormholing their way around the map with portals. Finally, the Sebrask faction takes a more militaristic approach, with weapons that fire a little more slowly but hit harder than others, and the ability to throw either a sticky frag grenade or a smoke grenade that can short-circuit portals. Sebrask’s main ability is a deployable forcefield that blocks enemy bullets but not friendly ones, giving the class a more defensive posture.

While the different factions all play a little differently from each other, the key elements of how Splitgate works keep them from being too powerful. None of the classes are so strong that you can’t drop them in a few shots thanks to Splitgate 2’s fairly quick time-to-kill, and even the slowest faction, Sebrask, is still pretty fast. All players use portals, sprinting, jetpacking, and sliding to fight, and while each faction has slightly different options for weapons, passive perks, and abilities, the speed with which you can kill or be killed and your agility in getting around act as solid equalizers.

The factions do a great job in giving players incentives to work together and take on particular roles on a team, though, and Splitgate 2’s best advancement over the original formula is pushing more teamwork and less lone-wolf play. That’s done both through the class system and with Splitgate 2’s approach to game modes. We only played two modes during the preview session–team deathmatch and Hotzone, Splitgate’s take on King of the Hill–but both have been tweaked for both a greater focus on teamwork and to help create breakout gameplay moments.

In both cases, the game modes are separated into multiple rounds. In deathmatch, that means the first team to score 15 kills wins the round; the match then resets and both teams start again, until one team wins three rounds. The approach tends to give a losing team the chance to regain ground and turn a loss into a win, rather than suffer a lengthy pummeling. It also equalizes the match, since power weapons spawn on the same timer in each round.

In Hotzone, the round approach heavily pushes teamwork, thanks to adjustments in how teams score points and how respawning works. Like in other King of the Hill game modes in other games, the idea is to hold a specific piece of territory for a set amount of time, with a team scoring a point for “capturing” the territory–three captures wins the round. But unlike in other modes, both teams share a capture timer, meaning one team can sit on a control point for 29 of the required 30 seconds, and the other team can swoop in, kill them, and grab that last second on the timer to get the point. It’s a pretty brilliant adjustment to the mode, encouraging teams to either think defensively to hold the zone or try for a last-second, heroic team strike using their portals and abilities in concert.

Complicating matters is the respawn timer, which starts at five seconds and then increases over the course of a round to a total of 20 seconds. That cuts players’ abilities to just keep throwing themselves at the hotzone over and over, and instead requires coordination in order to make an effective push against an entrenched team. However, if your team racks up kills while you’re respawning, the timer gets cut by three seconds with each kill, so there’s an incentive to keep fighting. Coupled with the round-based approach, the Hotzone adjustments made for some ridiculous moments in our play session, as well as deflating losses because our team hadn’t thought through our strategy and were easily bested by a more-coordinated group.

Throughout the play session, Splitgate 2 was a lot of fun, however. It manages the original’s feel of being easy to pick up but offering a high skill ceiling, and all the adjustments between the games feel like natural outgrowths of the underlying arena-shooter ideas. Just having portals available in a competitive shooter makes for a lot of chaos. But the adjustments to Splitgate 2’s gameplay modes and the addition of team abilities feel like both complements to and checks against the potential for better players to overwhelm you with their cunning use of teleportation and quick movements. It’s clear 1047 Games has thought deeply and critically about its game beyond its initial gimmick, and it was surprising how well all the pieces worked together in unison.

What I liked best about Splitgate 2 was how much of an identity it brings to the competitive shooter space. It harkens back to a very specific era in shooter history and is obviously greatly influenced by games like Halo, Unreal Tournament, and Tribes, but it also feels very different from everything else in the shooter field right now. It’s a fast, intense shooter with a lot of great design ideas working in concert, and at least across four hours, it felt like a worthy successor to and an advancement over the original game.