Scramble Knights Royale’s RPG Foundations Could Make It A Battle Royale For Fortnite Haters

After Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite made battle royale the biggest genre in online games, countless competitors sprung out only to find they were no match for the games at the top. Now that the competition has thinned out, a new battle royale is getting a weekend-long playtest ahead of its launch later this year, and it might just be carving out a unique enough niche to find an audience all of its own.

Scramble Knights Royale was announced during the 2025 Day of the Devs: Game Awards Edition, showing off its player-versus-player gameplay and claymation-inspired art style. Where most battle royale games take the form of first-person shooters, Scramble Knight Royale instead takes after top-down RPGs like The Legend of Zelda, putting a new twist on a genre in need of some innovation.

Developer Funktronic Labs plans to release Scramble Knights Royale later in 2026, but anyone interested can try the game early for free during a playtest running on Steam from January 9 to 11. The playtest is open only for players in North America for Funktronic’s first server test, but the developer says a global playtest will also happen some time before launch. Anyone who participates in this round or in future tests will unlock in-game rewards when Scramble Knights Royale launches, but the developer hasn’t revealed yet what they will entail.

I’ve never been one for battle royales myself, preferring cooperative multiplayer games over competitive ones, but Scramble Knights Royale already has my attention. That’s partly due to its adorable art style, but it’s mostly because of the way it seems to fuse action RPG fundamentals with its competitive core.

Each round of Scramble Knights Royale starts with 32 competitors arriving on an island by boat. At first, you’ll be left without armor or weapons to fend for yourself against the island’s NPC enemies, gaining more power until you can take on human opponents. The island is also dotted with caves where you can dodge traps and fight stronger enemies to gain loot that will give you the upper hand in future fights. Merchants give you a place to spend gold you earn along the way on better equipment and magical abilities, meaning that crafting a solid build could play into your victory or defeat as much as raw combat skill. Like any battle royale, the space you have to move around is limited by an ever-shrinking circle of safety, eventually forcing survivors into fights with one another until only one remains alive.

None of that is too far off from a typical battle royale, but its RPG trappings could immediately make it more appealing for players like me who favor third-person action over first-person shooters. And since there’s at least the possibility of spending most of your time looting dungeons rather than fighting other players, it could also be more friendly to those of us who don’t go in for pure competition. Friendly NPCs around the island can even offer simple quests like slaying a certain number of non-player enemies, so the player-versus-environment elements of the game do seem to be just as important as the PvP side.

Battle royale games can be extremely uninviting for newcomers. If you go into an established one without honed shooter skills and knowledge of how that particular game works, it’s not hard to find yourself knocked out before you even know what hit you. Scramble Knights Royale could provide a somewhat less stressful way in to the genre, with slower RPG-style combat compared to fast-paced shooters and a way for newcomers to gear up by fighting NPCs before taking on their fellow players. Of course, getting in as soon as the game launches could also eliminate that skill gap, making the upcoming playtest a good chance to see if Scramble Knights Royale could be the game for you before it’s open to everyone.

Scramble Knights Royale will be released on PC and Xbox in 2026. Its playtest runs on Steam from January 9 to 11.