‘Mini Royale: Nations’ Is a Fun First-Person Shooter—That Sometimes Misses the Mark

Looking for a browser-based shooter to play on your lunch break at work or while at school? Mini Royale: Nations might be the game for you.

The free-to-play first-person shooter, developed by Web3 game studio It’s too far, adopts a Fortnite-esque cartoonish art style with fast-paced, run-and-gun, Call of Duty-like gameplay. And on top of that, the game allows users to connect to their Solana or Ethereum wallet to buy and use NFTs on weapon and character skins.

It’s a simplistic shooter, as the web-based approach suggests, but it’s still amazing that you can jump from almost any modern computer for some competitive thrills. And the NFT elements are a fun sweetener, though not essential to the experience. However, a few quirks and hitches keep Mini Royale from being a consistently good time.

Run and gun

Mini Royale: Nations is pretty streamlined, with only two current game modes — team deathmatch and capture-the-flag — that play exactly as you’d expect if you’re familiar with other modern first-person shooters. shooter games. But more modes are “coming soon.”

You can use a total of 10 weapons in the game, with a variety of assault rifles, SMGs, a sniper rifle, and a shotgun—most of which you unlock right off the bat. Before you enter, you choose your loadout including the player model, primary and secondary weapons, and a smoke grenade.

Once in-game, the weapons feel responsive with manageable recoil, and have decently detailed models, while the maps are solidly designed and feel natural to explore. Early on, you’re placed in lobbies full of unskilled bots, which makes your first few games exhilarating as you dunk on quick opponents. That said, it’s hard to tell when the lobbies are no longer full of bots.

Player movement in Mini Royale feels like Counter-Strike, with bunny hopping in the mix—but unlike Valve’s smash team shooter, there’s little skill here. Just spam the spacebar and you’ll keep jumping. However, I found it to be a fun and effective way to get around the map while using melee weapons.

That said, due to the small number of guns, it is very easy to know who will prevail. The AK47 and MK18 feel like the strongest weapons overall, as both have great short and medium-range damage. SMGs are also effective, but you’ll need to adapt your playstyle to get up close and personal — they’re terrible at medium range.

Meanwhile, smoke grenades make a really miserable puff of smoke, which makes them almost useless. Don’t bother them. The time to kill (TTK) rating for most weapons is very low, especially if you hit an enemy in the head. However, sniper rifles are not very satisfying due to the lack of a one-hit kill in the chest, in addition to the small maps that limit their use.

All the maps are designed logically enough so that you can find your way around without having to use the mini-map or think too hard — perfect for a casual shooter game like this. Each map is also thematically different from the previous one, providing a nice sense of variety while playing.

That being said, the breeding system is terrible. Depending on the map, you may be able to find a place to stand and spawn a trap for opponents—in other words, just kill them repeatedly as they exit the world. I used to get 22 of my team’s 30 kills from doing this. In other areas, you can simply walk into the area of ​​enemy spawn points and smash them. This really needs to be addressed.

While the game has its flaws, Mini Royale is definitely still fun with a playful, run-and-gun nature. However, I can only say this because I knocked the enemy down a lot. See, winning is fun!

Play anywhere

The Fortnite-style aesthetic suits a browser game, as it can look cartoonish and playful while not demanding too much from the device running it.

As such, while playing, I experience regular latency spikes or frame rate drops. This usually happens during a fight with an enemy, resulting in me losing the gun. I am playing on a powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card with over 100Mbps download speed, so this is not an issue.

I asked a friend to test the game on his 2017 MacBook Pro. It runs fine, but he also experiences these spikes even when playing on different Wi-Fi networks with less than 70Mbps downloads.

Overall, the game is apparently playable on most computers or laptops—making it perfect for a lunchtime game or quick thrills anywhere. However, lag and frame rate issues are unavoidable in the current state of the game.

It’s also hard to see the fact that every time someone shoots at you, they stop. I’m not sure if I’m playing against bots or if the game engine is struggling to make the micro-movements people make while shooting. Mini Royale sometimes had player models facing the wrong way, which meant I got killed by characters facing the opposite direction.

There are some graphical glitches that you have to encounter, as well. For example, sometimes when you equip your smoke grenade, your primary weapon stays out. That said, none of the glitches completely ruined the game. They are just annoying.

NFTs or not?

Mini Royale: Nations is completely free to play, with NFTs as an optional customization feature.

During the test, I connected my wallet to Solana and went to the Magic Eden market to buy a player skin and three weapon skins. This set me back less than $20 and added some spice to the game—I was no longer a default skin ‘n00b.’ The biggest benefit I saw was my AK47 skin, which changed the iron sights and made it easier to use.

Another great feature is that it’s free Ready Player Me integration, which allows you to create an in-game character model based on a photo of yourself. I uploaded a photo and it quickly created a nice hobby for me to use. The process was seamless, and it was so much fun to see myself in the game.

Honestly, as great as this feature is, it makes you question whether buying a character skin is really worth it. But some players may be keen to own their assets, of course, or may prefer more extravagant designs. And once you connect your wallet, you also have the option to join a clan to play events for chance to win in-game prizes or even the Solana (SOL) cryptocurrency.

Finally, Mini Royale: Nations can be disappointing. It has a good foundation with weapons and maps tailored to its target audience of in-browser gamers, but latency spikes and weird graphical glitches — combined with a terrible spawn system — limit the fun.

This is a game I like. In my youth, I knew I loved playing Mini Royale in my school lunch, hidden in the corner of the IT room. Its downfalls are pretty obvious… but sometimes that’s OK for a game you only play for 30 minutes at lunch.