
You won’t be building an entire base like in Fortnite, but you can break down basic items like shirts and backpacks into pieces of cloth that can be turned into bandages for healing, or combined with duct tape and sheets of metal for body armor. The good news is there’s never a dull start.The one extra layer to the typical looting phase that H1Z1 introduces is some light crafting elements. The bad news is that there’s little variety: even though the locations of the houses I loot may change, the loot cycle always stays the same. That’s enough to carry me to the end game when the crates of really good stuff start to fall. The good news is that there’s never a dull start – during my time with H1Z1 I’ve rarely needed to check more than two or three houses before I had all three weapon slots filled, a helmet, a backpack, and a thrown item like a grenade or molotov cocktail. Since the entirety of H1Z1’s design is predicated off of ramping up the action, the looting of the countryside is greatly compressed relative to most battle royale games. The circle in H1Z1 shrinks slowly over the course of the match, just as you’d expect, except here the threat you’re avoiding is depicted as deadly poisonous gas instead of an electric force field. The first all about looting and getting to the circle, if you aren’t already in it.


Once on the ground, in my experience, a match of H1Z1 consists of three phases. In February 2016, the original zombie-focused H1Z1 was renamed as Just Survive, and in August 2017, King of the Kill was renamed back to H1Z1, and finally launched out of early access on February 28, 2018. A few months later it added a tense battle royale multiplayer mode known as King of the Kill, which proved so popular it was spun out into its own separate Early Access game. Originally, H1Z1 debuted on Steam Early Access in 2015 as a hardcore zombie survival game inspired directly by the popular ARMA 2 mod, DayZ.

Most teams end up picking the same handful of popular spots regardless of the safe zone and just drive to the zone once they find a vehicle. (In PUBG, by contrast, the plane’s path and the circle’s placement is random, and you only get to pick when you drop.) Picking where to go makes the drop feel more strategic, but removes a lot of the impromptu strategy involved with random drop spots, and that makes them feel more routine. For example, at the very start of each match teams pick which region of the map to drop down to, and as areas become more populated they’ll start to glow yellow, orange, and eventually red, giving you the ability to determine how much of a firefight you want to immediately land in. H1Z1 tries to fill that void with fast-paced action, but isn’t entirely successful.
