Review: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Xbox One)

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG as it’s more commonly called took the gaming world by storm earlier this year when it was released PC. PUBG quickly became a phenomenon among PC players, especially those streaming to Twitch. But now, Xbox One players are joining in the fun. That’s right! PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is now available on Xbox One! Keep in mind, the game is still a work in progress so we’re not seeing finished results here. Nevertheless let’s jump into one of the most popular games of this last year, if not decade, finally available on Xbox One.

First, I have to get something off my chest. My experience playing PUBG on Xbox One is my first ever time ever playing this game. Plainly put, the gameplay is a lot of fun. During my time playing the game, I attempted a variety of different approaches; run and gun, stealth, and even staying the hell away from everyone. On my third ever round I got 4th with killing few people and just staying out of people’s way. Then I played a more chaotic round, killed more people but only got to about 60th. The game offers multiple different playstyles for you to try out and see what fits. The game is extremely thrilling. I’ll be holed up in a small bunker and then all of a sudden bullets pepper the walls and windows and then silence, not knowing where your attacker is.

The mechanics are a great challenge to the already difficult game. Having to keep an eye on your map as the circles slowly tighten on a specific point on the map while also dealing with enemy players. At first, it sounded awful to me, but once I got in the thick of it, and especially with a team calling out commands, I realized just how much fun it was.

PUBG is a prime example of why I will never invest my money in Xbox’s Game Preview line of video games. Game Preview is just a fancy way of saying “the game is not finished and we don’t really know when it will be finished’’. It’s very apparent from the first few minutes of gameplay that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the Xbox One is not finished. It runs atrociously and looks even worse. After about 20 minutes with the game, I had a headache thanks to the constant frame drops. Most textures just never loaded, ever. Nothing in this game looked good. More times than not you wouldn’t be able to grab the sweet loot because it would be submerged into the ground. I love being pinballed around the map as well. I’ll be walking up to a house and then I’ll immediately get shot back 10 feet, and then a few feet right, then a few left. This happened way more times than it really should have.

The inventory menus are a nightmare to navigate and it took me a while to figure out how to work everything. The menu system obviously caters to PC play and isn’t properly optimized for console play making it very difficult to do what you need to do. Trying to figure out how to access your bandages while getting shot at isn’t fun. The game makes aiming very difficult. Often times I’ll miss an enemy a few feet away with a shotgun. Normally I wouldn’t blame a game’s aiming mechanic, but I’m a pretty good shot in almost every other game I play but for some reason in PUBG there is difficulty.

PUBG offers some fun rounds of mayhem full of thrill, stealth, and murder but suffers greatly with its performance on console. When Fortnite’s Battle Royale game mode is readily available (and for FREE, mind you), it’s mind-boggling how anyone would actively choose, and pay for, PUBG, at least at this stage in its console life. The developers have a lot to fix with this game and until they do I can’t see myself dropping into the Battlegrounds anytime soon. PUBG is a lot of fun on PC and I feel like that’s where it should stay.