Butter Royale, freshly posted to Apple Arcade as of January 24th, is a heck of a surprising game. Perceptive purveyors of the Apple Arcade platform may have noticed a significant battle-royale sized hole in the platform before Butter Royale’s release. Developer Mighty Bear Games has done an excellent job with the game, creating a completely safe environment for younger audiences to enjoy the genre inspiring so many Fortnite-alikes. Butter Royale is certainly a promising new entry to the Apple Arcade platform!
Butter Royale plays fairly simply; players run around a wide open map and collect weapons and armor in the hopes to survive longer than everyone else. It controls as a very basic twin-stick shooter, but it would be a mistake to dimiss the game for being simple.
To begin explaining the appeal of Butter Royale, one must understand why people have been so frustrated with the Battle Royale genre. I will explain the biggest two gripes I have with most of these games, and how Butter Royale has seemed to solve the problems.
First off is the toxic player base many online games have. As a bit of anecdotal evidence, allow me to talk about my time playing online games on Xbox. I’ve literally lost count of the time I have been having fun in a multiplayer game, minding my own business, when suddenly I get an angry message from someone I had just played with. Mind that when I say angry, I mean rude, vile, and even malicious. Butter Royale solves this very quickly, as there is no communication in the game, either in matches or between them. There is very little time that players can be rude to each other, and it is such a relief. It also helps that many of the other ‘players’ you run into in the game are computer controlled ‘bots’. Newer players can even have entire games against just these AI’s.
Secondly are Butter Royale’s stance on microtransactions. There are NO real money purchases in game. Parents do not have to worry about their kid lowering their credit score through buying loot boxes with this one! There is an ingame currency that players earn through leveling up, which can be spent on new appearances for their characters. We have Apple Arcade’s strict rules against paid microtransactions to thank for Butter Royale’s generous amount of content.
Butter Royale is a very visually clean game, with an almost ridiculous amount of cosmetic changes players can earn and use to customize their characters. Butter Royale really impressed me with how diverse the visuals all are, from bigger scale things like how wide a range of colors and theme the map has, to something as simple as the weapons on the floor being easy to differentiate from each other.
The game really impressed me, offering a simple but a heck of a solidly built package for Apple Arcade users. I do feel like playing more than a match or two a day would bore me fairly quickly, so maybe Mighty Bear Games can add some more specific challenges for committed players. I would certainly recommend checking Butter Royale out on Apple Arcade.
Like this review? Be sure to follow me on Twitter @IndieSamAdonis! Also check out EpicBrew.net, a website from my buddy Tom who is putting a lot of energy into reviewing indie games.
IndieSamAdonis 