Watchers is a top-down Battle Royale with wacky powers, beta available now

Watchers is an upcoming free-to-play Battle Royale shooter game from developer Blindfold. In such a competitive genre you need to have a trick or two up your sleeve if you want to succeed. Watchers tries, at least, to bring something new – that something is the Watcher mode.

There is a special mode in Watchers that players enter when they are killed.  Slowly but surely, the initial 24 players will be eliminated and get to affect the outcome of the battle via other unusual means. You can use anomalies and experiments such as making a juice machine fall from the skies and crush an unsuspecting player, give a super-speed ability to another player, rain laser beams from the sky, turn a player into a giant Battle Royale-er of doom, or transform everyone's weapons into bubble guns. Try killing a player with that one!

Naturally, the fewer battlers, the more watchers, and the more chaos in the arena as they trigger every kind of experiment. You can throw the rule book out of the window, because the winner is going to be the one that earns the favors of the watchers. It's almost like an ACME Battle Royale game!

Seems like a cool concept that puts an interesting spin to a tired genre. The question is if the matches in Watchers still feel rewarding to win, instead of unusually punishing. Players teaming up to destroy someone may also become an issue, as this may not be the best game to test your skills.

In case you are on the lookout for cool top-down shooters, we recently talked about the upcoming PolyStrike. This is a top-down recreation of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and is looking great.

The Watchers open beta is now live in case you want to give it a shot. It runs until August 4, 2019, with the servers up from 8pm – 12am PDT and 8am – 12pm PDT. The official site is live and this is where you can download the beta executable – apparently the beta isn't available through Steam for now.