Splitgate 2 is fast. It’s the dominating thought of my hours spent sampling the sequel’s new maps, weapons, loadouts, movement, abilities, and more. Despite the fact that it literally chugged on my PC (my own setup’s inadequacy, not the game’s), everything about it was quick. I barely had time to consider my loadout before I was brusquely pushed into the match. Once the action began, everything became a bit of a blur before coming to an abrupt stop mere moments later. Bullets flew, people spilled out of portals, and within about two minutes, the first round was over before I could even make sense of the changes Splitgate 2 was making to the gameplay I’d loved in the original.
From everything that Ian Proulx, the game’s creative director, shared in our short briefing prior to the preview, he and the team at 1047 certainly seemed like they wanted to amp things up like this. In that regard, I’d consider Splitgate 2 a pretty immediate success. The Splitgate brand of rapid-fire skirmishes and tactical portal placement is as polished as it’s ever been. The original game always felt good enough, but the sequel feels tight. There’s just a part of me that worries that, in scaling everything up, it may have lost a little bit of what made the original such a knockout.
Splitgate was touted as the meeting between Halo and Portal, two widely beloved and entirely different series of first-person games. But something they do have in common was this kind of space that either gave you to find your footing, whether it be in an online deathmatch or in a room you’re inspecting for puzzle solutions. Halo matches aren’t drawn out, but they also aren’t over in the blink of an eye, and Portal doesn’t enforce any time constraints, giving you all the time you need to solve its conundrums. Both were great at providing this sandbox for possibility and experimentation, and Splitgate did a decent job of channeling that spirit. That no longer feels like the case with Splitgate 2.
The original game wasn’t slow, but it felt methodical at times. Maps weren’t sprawls, but they had nooks and crannies that lent themselves to different kinds of encounters. It paid off to be surgical rather than gung-ho. Splitgate may have been a little floaty, but that was a fun alternative to Call of Duty’s emphasis on twitchy movement. Splitgate 2 abandons some of these tenets and falls in line with a number of ongoing trends in similar games, bucking what made the original so unique at the time in favor of some bid at even wider adoption.
I didn’t love how Splitgate 2 seems to forget what made the original game work for me. Team Deathmatch, as an example, used to be one extensive round in which the first team to 50 kills won. Now, Splitgate 2 has split it into several rounds with a maximum of 15 kills, and the first team to 3 wins takes the whole match. That meant that matches were over lightning fast. Before I could even get accustomed to the weapon I was using or the unique abilities of my loadout and class, the match was done.
Additionally, there’s a death mechanic that feels especially punitive. The more you die, which happens quite fast in Splitgate 2, the more time gets added to your respawn timer. The more I fumbled, the more I was denied the time and space to sort myself out in-game and establish a flow.
The other mode available in the preview, Hotzone, is similarly quick. A king-of-the-hill type mode, Hotzone’s conceit is that progression on the objective is shared between both teams. That means that you could come within a second of capturing, but if the enemy team takes you out and jumps on the point, they can claim it for themselves after only standing on it for a second. The idea appears to be to add some kind of pressure to act impulsively, but without any real way to combat the possibility of a sudden takeover, it just appears like a mean-spirited mechanic that can be manipulated to force early wins with little contention.
To aid things along, a lot of smaller aspects of Splitgate have been fine-tuned in the sequel to facilitate this faster and more aggressive pace. There is now a slide function, and your jetpack feels more propulsive than before, which should help you cover more ground. Portals are now tied to a single button, and the game has a system built to essentially guess which portal you meant to place down in order to eliminate some of the thinking that’d previously go into such a process. Portals can also be placed on top of enemies’ portals now, encouraging you to be bold and take the flank route more often.
On some level, these changes are absolutely welcome as quality-of-life features that just reduce the amount of inputs necessary to do anything. When taken into account among the wider changes to the game, though, such as the introduction of factions—classes with abilities like a wall-hack scan, a burst of speed, or a deployable shield—I worry that Splitgate 2 may be an entirely different game.
I love a good competitive shooter, but I think what a lot of people adored about Splitgate was how light-hearted and casual it could feel, with room for ventures into the more hardcore modes and lobbies if desired. Maybe Splitgate 2 will make a similar distinction, but from what was on offer for me, it seemed to lean entirely into the latter, abandoning a large audience that just wants something fun to pick up and play. I don’t like feeling that I have to be locked in every time I play a game, but that’s what playing Splitgate 2 for an afternoon felt like.
Which isn’t to say the game’s poor or bad, but that it feels like Splitgate 2 lost itself in this transformation. If this is the final form that 1047 hoped for out of the original Splitgate, well, then maybe that first game was a bit of a fluke. If you want another movement-heavy and highly competitive shooter with a unique central premise, Splitgate 2 certainly fits the bill. If you were drawn to the casual playfulness of the original title and expected the sequel to double down on that, though, you may be in for disappointment.