Squad Blast is Overwatch, CS:GO, and that competitive shooter spirit mashed into a 2D platformer

EGX was two weeks ago, which is wild. Time has really flown by. But, there’s one game there that’s really stuck in my mind as of late — especially as I've been kicking my heels in Overwatch 2 queues and looking for a quick, competitive FPS fix in the downtime. Enter Squad Blast, which has fixed itself onto me ever since I got my hands on it back in London. It’s got the spirit of Overwatch and CS:GO, but all excitingly represented on a 2D plane. As a result, it really is quite brilliant.

I spent a good chunk of my time at EGX messing around with Squad Blast, and was fortunate enough to interview Anatolijs Ropotovs – CEO and founder of Ultrahorse – about the inspirations for the title, what the studio is hoping to achieve, and why it thinks players will hop over from some of the genre’s big hitters and try out this fresh, more 2D approach.

Squad Blast is a team-based competitive shooter, where you and your partner set out to outsmart and outgun the enemy team within short, punchy objective-based matches. It’s hero-based, which means different characters have different weapons and abilities, and even in my short hour-or-so playing it at the show I could feel the counter-pick meta bubbling behind the scenes. The sniper dominates mid-ranged rocket users, the shotgun beats out the sniper, and the rocket is damn good at cutting off offensive shotgun pushes. You can play defensive, you can play offensive, but you’ve absolutely got to play well... otherwise you’ll see the clear difference between yourself and your opponents. Like in any good competitive title.

“It was the early days of lockdown, and we wanted to build a new type of competitive experience,” says Ropotovs. “We wanted to explore how to build a side-scroller tactical shooter that would be as fun as modern first-person shooter games. A game that would have enough depth and challenge, so it’s a hero shooter with a lot of variety of classes and squad interactions.”

But who is it for? There are, as with any multiplayer competitive game, two main crowds. The casuals and the hardcore, those who jump in every now and then, and those who will spend hours upon hours streamlining and enhancing their own play. The answer, according to Ropotovs, isn't binary. They’d like to appeal to both crowds, with the key to success aparently being found in both accessibility and familiarity.

“We want it to be as accessible with a lot of pick up and play components. We envision this can be played by the whole FPS audience, so that’s millions and millions of players. On one side we have that accessibility, with controller support and basic weapons like the homing bazooka fitting well in the hands of newer players. Then, once you go deeper, all the class interactions and special skills, that’s where the pro play comes in, and you see that depth.”

It’s time for the elephant in the room: why play Squad Blast as opposed to any other competitive shooter out there? A quick behind-the-curtain, it’s a question I ask all live service developers I interview, especially for those creating a game in a saturated market. There may not be many games out there providing exactly what Squad Blast is, but with the aim to appeal to the entire FPS player base, what does Squad Blast have to win that massive crowd over? The answer: a focus on balance and a non-frustrating experience. Not something every massive game out there possesses. Plus, player-created content.

“Squad Blast has fair play at heart. We’ll do this by having all of the weapons, classes and maps be well balanced. So this is our first main aspiration as a team of ex-semi pros. We always would like the game to be as balanced and polished for everyone to have a true competitive experience. The second aspiration for Ultrahorsel is to allow creativity and expression within the game. Once we'll go out of open beta and into to the full-scale launch, we’ll add a level editor to all the players, so they can build variety of gameplay experiences that probably will surpass what we can do ourselves.

Whether Squad Blast will make the impact the developers aspire to, and bring in the competitive shooter crowd they’re building the game for, remains to be seen. As for how you can experience the game right now, it’s released in closed beta on Steam, so you can apply for access it and try it out yourself. Let us know what you think of the game below, if you manage to get in!

For more EGX coverage, check out Jim's wonderful coverage of Shadows of Doubt, a brilliant detective RPG we loved at the show.