#oneaday Day 901: Yagerhole

Inadvertently went down an interesting rabbit-hole earlier. At lunchtime I decided to play a couple of OG Xbox games just for the hell of it, and one of them was Yager, a game I've never played before but remember a lot of people liking back in the day. With good reason, as it turns out; I'm looking forward to exploring that one further.

While I was playing Yager, though, I found myself thinking "hmm, Yager [for the devs share the name with the game] did something else, didn't they… what was it?" It was Spec Ops: The Line, a game which I thought was quite interesting, if perhaps a little overrated by chin-stroking navel-gazers of the day.

But then I noticed something else. I figured that Yager had just been quiet since Spec Ops: The Line, but I discovered they'd been working on a free-to-play game over on the Epic Games Store (boo hiss, whatever, I don't give a shit) called The Cycle — and it actually sounded rather interesting.

The Cycle describes itself as a "PvEvP" game, and it's kind of sort of an offshoot of the battle royale genre. The difference is that the sole aim is not to dispatch the other players; it's to score as many victory points as possible. And a significant number of victory points are acquired through doing things in the environment such as mining minerals, setting up gas refineries, collecting items and hunting monsters.

I've had little to no interest in battle royale games to date, but something about this concept really tickled my fancy, so I gave it a download earlier, played through the tutorial and enjoyed a match. And you know what, it seems to be pretty damn good.

I could do without all the "battle pass" bullshit that is de rigueur for this sort of game, but they do have to make money somehow, and that is at least a mildly less obnoxious means of getting people to cough up than energy bars and gacha. The base game seems enjoyable, though — and the sort of thing I can see myself playing off and on.

I don't know how much variety the game has in the long term, but I'm certainly intrigued to try it out at least a few more times in the near future. And if it sounds interesting to you too, give it a shot — it's free, after all!