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What happens when you take the hero shooter concept of Overwatch and throw it into a street full of less than amicable residents? Well, you get a completely ludicrous FPS-brawler hybrid like Neighbors Suburban Warfare, that’s what. With a lineup of hyperaggressive characters who will go much further than simply reporting you to your HOA, it’s one of the weirdest and most chaotic PvP multiplayer games I’ve seen in a long while. After unveiling its Steam release date this week, it’s kicked off an open beta, and it’s raking in surprisingly high amount of players.
We’ve known about Neighbors Suburban Warfare for a little while now, but the time has finally come for everyone to give it a spin. With some ranged combat plucked and team composition from FPS games like Overwatch, close-up melee brawling, and some base defense elements too, it’s already a pretty wild cocktail. Then you chuck that cocktail into the town of Heartsville where white picket fences become battle lines and Doreen, the sweet old lady across the way, pulls on her boxing gloves, and it becomes even more absurd.
In Neighbors, you pick from a lineup of characters (there’ll be eight at launch) each with different kits of abilities. The goal of its primary game mode is to essentially destroy the valuables of the opposing team, which are all found in their home base.
Before the match begins, a short preparation phase lets you build up defenses and set traps around your own home to hamper the opponents’ attempts to break your stuff. After this phase is over, it’s time to clash. Maybe you can try and sneak your way into your opponents’ house without being noticed and smash up as much as you can before you’re spotted. Or knock out members of the opposition to give you and your team a window of destruction while they’re down on numbers, waiting for respawns. Extra traps and items can also be purchased in the middle of matches with earned currency.
If you look at most of the clips going around of the multiplayer game’s open beta, things seem quite brawler-focused at the moment – everyone loves to throw down with Doreen, it seems. But within the roster of eight characters, you’ll soon realize there are alternative methods, such as ranged abilities, support heroes, or stealthy characters that can pick locks and scan for enemies.
While it’s a ridiculous premise for a PvP game, the start of its open beta couldn’t have really gone much better for a game of its scope and style. Currently free and open to all Steam players, thousands have flocked to it today – its peak concurrent player count topped out at over 8,800, which is pretty impressive and a lot more than I expected it to receive.
If you want to join them, the Neighbors Suburban Warfare open beta is live until Monday, March 24 at 2am PDT / 5am EDT / 9am GMT / 10am CET. The early access launch for the game is scheduled to arrive on Thursday, April 17.
Until then, here are some of the best fighting games for all you brawlers. Alternatively, these co-op games are also a blast to play with your friends.
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