Believe it or not, the battle royale genre is not dead. It’s definitely not thriving like it was back when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds released, but it found a solid foothold in the market of free-to-play games for kids.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came out in a really bad state, where only people with really good computers could run the game on its lowest settings, not because it was visually impressive, mind you, but because it was horribly optimized.

However, having a beefy computer is a tough requisite when you are about 13 years old, regardless of how much you try to convince your parents that it’s going to help out in school. This is where titles like Free Fire come in, providing a somehow even uglier version of PUBG, but one that is accessible for kids that only have a phone as their gaming device.

Free Fire has managed to linger in the Brazilian Play Store’s top 10 most popular games for about 6 years now, sporting over a billion downloads. Naturally, this turns some heads, and this is where Farlight 84 tries to get its piece of the pie.

Farlight 84 is basically a mixture of Free Fire and Apex Legends, sporting the same gameplay loop but adding skills and team compositions to the game. The visuals are somewhere between Fortnite‘s cartoonish art style and Free Fire‘s colorful techwear.

But for now, enough with the comparisons, because there are some aspects unique to Farlight 84 that I actually really enjoy. Farlight 84 is pretty standard as a battle royale, but it has some unique ideas of its own. Every character gets two mobility skills, one horizontal and the other vertical.

The horizontal skill has two charges, while the vertical skill has only one. They start off with pretty long cooldowns, but as the player levels up, they start to recharge much faster. Farlight 84 has a leveling system where opening chests or killing players gives experience rewards.

This experience influences both your cooldowns and your damage, eventually racking up to a 40% damage increase, which can be huge in a competitive game. This leveling system forces players to take risks and constantly engage in firefights, as being underleveled means doing less damage.

This also means that players aren’t dependent on weapon rarity systems like in Fortnite, since your guns increase in rarity as you level up. No match had me feeling like I got completely screwed by luck, which is refreshing in a battle royale.

Your shields also have a leveling system of their own; they start off covering about 30% of your health bar but can be leveled up to cover 100%. A lot of battle royale games give players almost no incentive to actually engage in firefights until the very end, so it’s nice to see one that rewards players for reckless behavior.

However, maybe the game incentivizes reckless behavior a bit too much. For the first half of the match, whenever a player dies, they can simply respawn immediately. As soon as you finish draining someone’s health bar, you can watch them start falling from the sky, like the match has just begun.

This leads to you killing a player and watching as they immediately land near you to try their luck again. Considering how fast the matches are and the fact that most of the people in the game are either kids or bots, this is really not necessary.

This can only happen once per player and stops being a thing about halfway through the match, when respawning gets locked, but it’s still infuriating because for the first half of the match, your kills don’t really matter.

This is only a thing in duos, which is a shame because it’s the game mode that seems to have the most actual players, while in squads it feels like even your teammates may be bots. The lines have definitely started to blur when it comes to bots in multiplayer games, but there are still some ways to spot them.

I can’t rag on Farlight 84 too much for this because it’s becoming increasingly common to populate matches with bots. It doesn’t mean I like it, but I understand that it means shorter queues and faster matches, plus the kids need to get some easy kills to keep playing too.

I also wish it had a solo mode since the game only lets you play in duos or squads. Playing by myself against duos with autofill turned off is pretty fun, but I still want the true battle royale experience of me versus 99 other people.

Overall, I am perfectly fine with Farlight 84. It’s hard to quantify how much I enjoy it over any other free-to-play battle royale since they are all roughly the same game with different art styles, but I enjoyed my time with it, even though it felt fabricated to keep me playing.

The game is still in early access, which gives me hope that some of the more annoying mechanics will be changed, but at the same time, I understand why they exist, especially since I’m not the main target audience for the game.

Farlight 84 is a non-janky version of Free Fire with some of Apex Legends’ mechanics sprinkled in. It’s definitely not original or unique, but there are much worse games to play. The game has a pretty sizeable playerbase and feels really polished on PC, so if you want to dunk on some unsuspecting kids, it’s the game for you.

Farlight 84 is available for Android, iOS, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam’s Early Access).