Feature What are your first impressions of Valorant, Riot's upcoming free-to-play hardcore FPS?

[SWard]

Valorant, Riot's new free-to-play hardcore FPS, will launch summer 2020

A beta will come sometime earlier, but barring any major problems Riot expects Valorant will launch soon.

www.pcgamer.com

Valorant, Riot's new free-to-play hardcore FPS, will launch summer 2020

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8amyzDHOKw

• We went hands-on with Valorant—check out our full preview here
• Valorant will release sometime "this summer"
• Riot is on a crusade to eradicate 'peeker's advantage' in Valorant

For a full breakdown of each character and their abilities, check out our extensive Valorant characters guide.

Here's our full stack of info:

Valorant characters guide: Every Agent in Riot's FPS

From hurling fireballs to erecting walls of poison smoke, Valorant characters have some cool abilities.

www.pcgamer.com

So, what do you think? Is Riot on to a winner?

 

[Jeff Kaos]

Good or bad when I see the phrase "Free to Play (FPS)" I usually write the game off. Because my experience has been that no game asks for more money than "Free to Play" games. Sure, you're not required to spend money on a lot of these games but it's strongly encouraged. And it seems like most of these games stay afloat by 12 year olds bothering their parents for in-game money. And F2P shooters nowadays are like MMO's 15 years ago and Online Survival games 5 years ago: there's already so many of them it seems like it would be a real challenge to break in and make a mark. Most new games like this seem to have a really good first few weeks until players gravitate back to whatever game they came from like Fortnite, PUBG, or Apex Legends.

 

[Frindis]

The gameplay looked ok enough and the peeker's advantage that Steven Messner wrote about is an interesting approach to the ping/aggressivity issue. Will it survive or get eaten by the sharks? If it manages to bring an intelligent map layout, competitive level of gameplay, characters with interesting synergies - then it might just manage to stay afloat.

 

[MeFirst]

"Meh"

The looks alone are a turn-off for me. I don't like the weird mix of TF2 meets CS, meets Overwatch. To be fair, not just in regard to how the game looks, but also how the gameplay looks. I rather see multiplayer FPS that os trying a bit harder to make something fun and somewhat original.

In a just world, we would get a good Titanfall 3 in the foreseeable future. ;-)

 

[JSimenhoff]

I'm super excited. I trust Riot to provide expertly designed, well-balanced tactics, and I think they can take that expertise to any genre. I'll be honest, the game doesn't necessarily look great, but that's the price you pay for accessibility.

Can't wait to squad up for it in the next couple of months.

 

[DirePuppy]

I like the gunplay of csgo more than overwatch and I heard someone compare it to that. I like the idea of more gun traditional but with a little bit of hero stuff. If they can an make it less infuriating than ow I'm in

 

[WookieBlaster]

Looks fairly decent, a bit weary of it being free to play but hopefully we have something good here. Hopefully its balanced enough.

 

[XoRn]

It's really hard to gauge without getting my hands on it. If Counter Strike is our primary comparison, Many of the abilities seem to functionally replace the various grenades, even requiring being purchased at that round start, the mid CT position is a third bombsite (which doesn't actually change much from your basic CS map design), and a lot of little quality of life improvements have been added (being able to directly purchase a gun for a teammate, seeing grenade effects on the minimap, maps that are astetically designed for visibility and gameplay rather than mimicking an environment).

I'd really like to play it and see how it feels overall but it's much closer to a reskinned CS than I had anticipated based on what little footage we've seen thus far.

 

[Doomed_User]

I like shooters with shorter TTK and where the actual shooting is the main tactic. This game seems to be more focused on that than say, Overwatch. It looks like a CS/Overwatch mash up of sorts, will need to see how it plays.

 

[Doomed_User]

I like the gunplay of csgo more than overwatch and I heard someone compare it to that. I like the idea of more gun traditional but with a little bit of hero stuff. If they can an make it less infuriating than ow I'm in

Basically how I feel about it as well.