Splitgate 2 remains a portal-hopping FPS delight, but it really needs to lighten up

Now, I never played quite as much as our Brendy did of the original Splitgate. But I had a fun time with its mixture of Halo-esque trigger pulling and portalling around! So I was intrigued to give the alpha version of Splitgate 2 a go and see if it had a little more substance to it than its initial reveal, which gave off a, "it's Splitgate but with more money" feel.

Well, I think it's… a bit serious? It certainly has more polish and some extra additions, yet I didn't come away from it thrilled by its more competitive, class-based FPS leanings. I think it just needs a bit more time, perhaps, for a portal to open and some silly rocket launchers and baseball bats and zombies to come tumbling out of it.

It's a bit odd, I think, that the devs wanted Splitgate 2's first outing to be more of a competitive showcase, where the first Splitgate's merits lay in the goofiness of its shooting and portal-hopping. And yes, from what I played of the alpha, Splitgate 2 retains all of the portal-hopping and some of the goofiness that's propelled by those magical gateways. You can pop your head into portals, clothesline lads with bullets to necks, and then get back to regular proceedings as if you'd just clocked someone at a McDonald's drive thru. I certainly found myself doing a bit of handrubbing and a bit of grinning at my, largely accidental, plays.

Those portals have been improved a bit too, letting you stack portals over an enemy's to encourage flanks, and some new tech makes portals intelligently snap to positions it thinks you've meant to target (although optional toggles in the menu mean you can turn these features on and off). None of these things I noticed a great deal, to be fair, but then again, I imagine more serious players will appreciate these micro-adjustments.

And that's the thing: Splitgate 2 seemed more serious. The two modes we played, Team Deathmatch and Hot Zone, both pandered to the esports way of doing things. Team Deathmatch wasn't just a race to however-many kills, but it was split into rounds, where the aim was to win three rounds in total, and a round win was a race to 15 kills. And Hot Zone was essentially King Of The Hill, but capture progress was shared across teams, so you could theoretically swoop in at the last minute and tear the capture away from the enemy at the last second.

Sure, I get that Splitgate 2's alpha preview event wasn't going to show its entire hand, and that these modes aren't the finished product. 1047 Games co-founder and creative director Ian Proulx even said to me that what we played was a "very small sample of what's to come", and they're waiting to see "how the community reacts". For me at least, those modes felt a bit jarring and more inline with Call Of Duty's death blender philosophy, with some fast time-to-kill thrown in. For the fast-twitch folks out there who like blazing around and arcing their elbows across their desks to secure headshots - perfect! But for a former Counter:Striker and Overwatcher who now can't be arsed to climb the ranks, I genuinely felt as if the game wasn't built for my tired mitts anymore.

So yes, I had wrung some fun from the portal-hopping, but I did find myself a bit behind the pace and longing for a mode that wasn't quite so catered to pure skill and more catered towards flying through portals like you're at some futuristic kid's park. Then again, at least guns had some serious punch and some delightful flavour. The wind-up of the shotguns and the twirliness of the reload animations? Chef kiss.

There's also a bunch of new factions, each with their own abilities. The idea being that teams will mix and match rosters to create on-the-fly combos that'll counteract each other between rounds; an esportsy vision likely driven by Overwatch's or Team Fortress 2's hero switches. For instance, the Aeros faction had an ability that sped you up a bit for a short duration. While another I'll refer to as the Purple Guys, let you chuck down a little area-of-effect dome that slowed down time for enemies who wandered through it. Perhaps in part because of the nature of the preview, with teams filled with newcomers, I certainly didn't get a sense that our team's picks hindered or emboldened a sense of cohesion.

To be honest, I rarely used my abilities at all and instead preferred to focus my few brain cells on aiming and using my portals effectively. Maybe only once did I notice a genuine advantage given to us by a teammate, who used the equivalent of a wallhack ability to reveal enemy silhouettes and let me better track approaching baddies. It might just be that their usefulness changes as time goes by and with the introduction of some different modes.

Besides my misgivings, I think Splitgate 2 is shaping up okay. Its fundamentals are solid and it's been given a more premium feel now, with shinier maps and more fluid animations. But I remain a bit skeptical over its classes, which had little impact on any of the games I played over the course of the preview. Here's hoping the next time the game appears, whether that's behind or in front of us or both at the same time, it brings with it some goofiness. None of this serious esportsy, fast-twitch muscle fibre stuff. Just stupid stuff. Pure dumb dumb. I'd love for it to remind me and others of similar ilk that it's also a game for us, too, the tired ones in the corner who just want some knee-slaps after a day's toil.