Published on: 15/12/2021

Is Warzone the Best Battle Royale Game Ever?

When Warzone launched in March of 2020, it rapidly became one of the most played games in history. Fortunately for Activision, Warzone’s release coincided with a global pandemic, during which the vast majority of the world was shut behind closed doors. As most of the world stayed home, tens of millions of gamers downloaded this free-to-play battle royale game. In this article, we’re asking a very important question: Is Warzone the best battle royale game ever?

It’s worth highlighting that the battle royale genre has only really existed since 2017 – at least in the mainstream. It was made popular by releases like Fortnite, PUBG, and Apex Legends. There are now a few dozen games within the genre. Which among them can be named the best battle royale game, and does Warzone qualify for that title?

Quantity Over Quality

While Warzone might boast a ridiculously high player count, it doesn’t have the best reviews overall. If we look at a platform like Metacritic, we can get a snapshot view of Warzone’s performance against every other popular battle royale game. Let’s throw a few numbers out there, working with the highest ratings each game has received on Metacritic:

• Apex Legends – 89%
• PUBG – 86%
• Fortnite – 85%
• Fall Guys – 81%
• Warzone – 80%
• Hyper Scape – 68%

As you can see, Warzone places quite low in the charts, and it sits at the bottom of the ‘all-time greatest’ list. When it comes to discussing the best battle royale games, Apex, PUBG, Fortnite, and Warzone are considered to be the top titles. Unfortunately, Warzone is pipped to the post by all of them, with Apex Legends, EA’s battle royale, sitting at the top of the table. If we’re working with nothing but cold, hard numbers, then no, Warzone isn’t the best battle royale game.

Up until April 2021, popular aggregate site Statista was tracking the growth in Warzone users. Between March of 2020 and April of 2021, the player base grew from approximately six million to more than 100 million users. That figure has continued to grow, but are we talking about a quantity over a quality argument? Let’s not forget – Warzone is remarkably accessible, being available on all formats for the flat price of absolutely nothing.

The Plagued Lifecycle

When it first launched, Warzone was definitely one of the best battle royale games around. It essentially redefined the genre, bringing battle royale to as mainstream an audience as possible. It started to take over all forms of content creation, including YouTube and Twitch streaming. Although, within a few months, the platform began suffering massively, with the emergence of hackers and a seemingly endless stream of bugs and issues.

In December of 2021, a brand new Warzone map was launched, to extremely negative reception. While many creators had held on for this map to drop, when it was finally released (after almost two years of the same map), it left a sour impression on the community. Once again, the game was wrought with bugs and glitches, performance issues, and bad servers, and it was too little, too late. Following the superior performance of titles like Apex Legends and the releases of Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite, Warzone found itself floundering.

Before, there was a great exodus, with top-tier content creators like Dr Disrespect and NICKMERCS abandoning Warzone for Apex Legends. It seems that, by the numbers, Apex might just be the best battle royale game ever. Can Warzone’s platform ever regain the popularity and stability that it once boasted?

We sure hope so.