Game Title: Splitgate 2
Platform: PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X/S/PC
Genre: First Person Shooter
Developer: 1047 Games
Demo Released: 28th February 2025 - 3rd Match 2025
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+
Indie Developer 1047 Games made a successful online multiplayer shooter with portals that was Splitgate that originally launched all the way back in Beta in 2019 before re-emerging with cross-play support and refining a lot of the gameplay in 2021. Since then, Splitgate has went on to become a remarkable throwback shooter that wasn't anything like the amount of Live Service Battle Royales and Hero Class Shooters that die out very quickly and Splitgate was popular among PlayStation players like myself.
Now 1047 Games is looking to follow from the success of Splitgate with the sequel which is going to evolve from more than just portals. The studio did release an Alpha Build of the game for players to play during the Gamescom 2024 Showing for PC players and 28th February 2025 was when the developers released another Open Alpha Build showing off additional progress made and allowing Cross-Platform play on not only the PC but also the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S which finally allows console players to join in the fun. The Open Alpha lasted from 28th February till the 3rd March. I played the Splitgate 2 Open Alpha on the PlayStation 5, which gave me a taste of what was to come and I was able to play a few game modes that were on offer.
For what I have played of the Open Alpha my first impression of the game is for the most part very positive with only one or two things I don't like but I like the rest of the ideas that 1047 Games that they going to go with the sequel.
So, the first thing about Splitgate 2 is that the game is refining the portal system where there is now a single portal button you use now to create one portal and another at what areas you can portal to instead of having two buttons to create as well as shut down portals which you can still do if you prefer the old setup in the control customization settings. There are no EMP Grenades to shut down enemy portals anymore, instead you can now shoot a portal at an enemy portal to disable their portals to prevent enemies going through their portals or shooting from them. This adds more ways of dealing with enemy portals so that enemies don't get the drop in on you and your team.
The new arenas for the game have many more spots to be able to use your portals and get around the arenas and your enemies quickly and are much more bigger and have more layer and floor planes than the design of the maps of the original Splitgate. One of the new maps shown in this Open Alpha is the Glacier map which is one of the first major large maps which is made specifically for the Multi-Team Playlists. The Glacier Map however is just a largely uninspired map with many ways to get ambushed over and doesn't have much spots to be able to make use of portals on it so everything just boils down to teams jumping right into the combat areas and getting the jump onto enemies before getting jumped on. I do like all of the other maps with my personal favourite maps being the Ozone and the Bypass which have the most creativity with the portals put into them. You'll still see some spots where players can place a portal on the top of something that they can portal through, jump into it and go flying which can give them the high ground advantage.
By far the biggest game changer with Splitgate 2 alongside the refined portal system is that the game introduces a faction system which is much similar to class-based shooters like Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch. So Splitgate originally started as a shooter that played like classic Halo and adopted classic multiplayer game modes and now wants to adopt a class-based system. Splitgate 2 features three different factions that have their own weapon loadouts, skills & abilities that change different play styles and these are the Sabrask, Aeros and the Meridian.
The Sabrask focuses on being as defensive by pulling out a smart shield wall to protect allies and being able to shoot through it as well as being able to throw Sticky Grenades that can stick to enemies just like the Plasma Grenades in the Halo games as well as allowing equipment items to recharge faster for both you and teammates. The Meridian is a support type who has grenades that heal other allies, can scan for nearby enemies which allows allies to see them through walls and lastly allows for faster health regeneration for you and other allies. The Aeros is the most unique of the three factions in the game so far as the Aeros moves faster than everyone else, can even boost the movement, firing and reload speed of their him and teammates while slowing down enemies and lastly pull out a Porta-Portal which allows you to shoot out a portal anywhere without even needing to put a portal at a wall which is the most game changer ability of them all.
They each have their own passive traits that can benefit their team and having three players on your team picking all three of the factions will give your team the maximum traits benefit of each faction to have better chances of victory rather than having everyone just favoring one faction.
Each of the factions have their own lineup of weapons ranging from Assault Rifles, Carbines, Shotguns, Burst Rifles, SMGs as well as a Light Pistol, Heavy Pistol and lastly a Burst Pistol which later weapons are unlocked by levelling up the faction's rank. Weapons can now be levelled up as well which will unlock perks for the weapon like increased ammo magazine size, improved range or increased overall weapon accuracy or rate of fire. The Sabrask's Trailblazer Assault Rifle has a nice mix of damage power and speed making it a very balanced choice for most encounters. Burst Rifles are great for zooming from long distances, pistols mostly function as small back up weapons for when you need to quickly swap to them and the Meridian Charger Shotgun functions like a Railgun requiring a second to charge before firing. There are also Power Weapons that spawn into the arena like a Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher, the BFB Bat which makes very well graceful return and also a new special weapon called the Splitstream which is an Assault Rifle that can both be wielded as a standard Assault Rifle as well as splitting into an akimbo mode at the cost of preventing you from using your portals. Yes, Shotguns can now be selected as a starting primary weapon in this game whereas they were one of the Power Weapons that offered a few shots to use in the original game so it is satisfying to be able to have the Shotguns be a primary weapon option in the sequel. They are overpowered as you would expect from them but all it takes is a good skilled player to know how it is meant to be handled.
Every weapon can now be Aimed Down Sights which is nothing more than just a basic zoom system much similar to the zooming in the Halo games. There is no Iron Sights or any kind of Scoped Aiming like in a lot of modern shooters like Call of Duty and also the crosshair doesn't seem affected by spraying fire much like in the original Splitgate so the ADS mechanic isn't really all that necessary unless it is for long range combat which rarely happens. Just work on the Aim Assist then the aiming is otherwise just fine.
My personal favourite weapons I used in the Alpha where the Sabrask's Trailblazer Assault Rifle and the Rattler SMG, the Meridian's Synapse Assault Rifle and lastly the Aeros' Tempo Assault Rifle which are all fantastic and fun to use weapons. I even enjoyed getting my hands on the BFB Bat anytime it spawned on the map and the impact of bonking someone with it is incredibly satisfying.
I did spend a lot of the time in the Open Alpha playing as the Sabrask mostly because of the Smart Wall ability was great to pull off when needed to save my allies as well as tossing Sticky Grenades into a room and watching it go off to clear a room is brilliant. I do like the other two classes as well and I wished I could have had more time to try out the Aeros faction because I do think that the Aeros faction is the most unique and creative faction in the game. I also just like the Aeros' Tempo Assault Rifle for the incredible balance of speed and power, like I can't express how good that gun really is.
As for game modes, the Open Alpha had a bunch of game mode playlists on offer as well as introducing the Multi-Team Game Type Modes where there are more teams competing for the objective which is going to lead into mass chaos. Currently the game has Team Deathmatch which is a simple take out all targets to reach the max score before the other team does, Hotzone is similar to King of the Hill but a team needs to sit in the capture area and hold out till the counter reaches 100% to win, Domination has teams trying to take hold of three control points on the map and hold them till the score reaches 100%. One of the stands out modes of Splitgate which makes a glorious return in the sequel is Splitball, in its teams have to score by getting hold of the ball whenever one of the Splitballs spawns into the arena. However now teams need to pick up the Splitball and bring them to their bases to score, you can now steal the balls from the enemy base when they take one of them and you have to prevent the enemies from taking the balls from your base. The newest game mode to Splitgate 2 is Firecracker where teams take turns planting the Firecracker at either one of two objective points on the map and defending it till it detonates while the defending team has to prevent the Firecracker from being detonated.
The vast majority of game modes are really well varied and are pretty fun to play. The standard playlists are quick and easy to get into while the multi-Team game modes lead to all out massive chaos on massive maps and thankfully the maps are well designed to take advantage of the map design. The biggest thing I have against the game modes and I am going to be really nitpicking about it is that I do not like the whole Round Based approach to matches that the game plans to go with. It just ruins the pacing and overall engagement of the matches and it just slows things down when matches were just only getting intense. Rounds are divided into a best of five rounds where each match requires three out of five round wins in order to win the match. If two teams win two rounds the game goes into a sudden death round where respawns are disabled and only objective is available to take so quick smart decisions are crucial to take that final win. I prefer for matches in my multiplayer games to go in a single run without any breaks inbetween them. Now they are going to introduce future playlists like the No Breaks Playlists which will not have any of the round-based stuff to it and the Multi-Team Game Modes are not round based so anybody that wants long singular based matches will have other modes to play.
If I have to pick out my favourite game mode so far in the Open Alpha it would easily be this version of Splitball especially with that now you have multiple Splitballs to get and defend from enemies which leads to a lot of all-out skirmishes trying to get three of the Splitballs to your base without other enemies trying to take them away from you. I do hope that 1047 Games add more game modes to Splitgate 2 in the future and if I had to suggest what game mode desperately needs to make a return then that would easily need to be Teabag Confirmed. It was an enjoyable game mode which even though teabagging other players is never encouraged in games but Teabag Confirmed was a comedic spin on Kill Confirmed that had you doing it to score points and I really would like to see that game mode return in the sequel and I hope that it happens even if it is one of the rotating game modes.
As for the gameplay and the gunplay, Splitgate 2 does pretty well in that regard. All of the guns sound incredibly good and getting an enemy down with any of the weapons in the game feels really empowering. The game manages to control pretty well especially on the controller and the console versions like the first game support Keyboard & Mouse if you prefer that setup. You can customize the control settings to your liking allowing for quicker and easier access to actions which is handy for things like portaling or jumping high, however you can't change the buttons you want to have for faction's abilities and if you assign certain actions to the two buttons that are assigned to the faction's abilities, you'll end up doing other actions you don't want by accident. I'm one of those people that prefers having L2 for Jump and L1 for Crouching and having R1 for Zooming and the faction abilities on the PS5 version is both L1 & R1 together which has me Crouching and Zooming when I don't want to. The option to change the button for the faction abilities would be most welcome and would make certain actions less of a hindrance.
Splitgate 2 manages to run pretty well on the PS5 Slim with a smooth Frame Rate Performance and I didn't experience any major dips down chaotic gun fights. The arenas so far have more detail to them than in the original game such as seeing a crowd of people cheering the competitors on in the Ozone and Zenith Maps, there are multiple fictional adverts of weapons and contests on panels that cycle around and the portals that you shoot out has an excellent whirlpool effect to them showing what is on the other side. It is also accompanied by fantastic explosion effects that are a sight to see, you can see snow flowing through the glacier map and the overall environment just looks really stunning.
Splitgate 2 Open Alpha's online net code and connections so far are great without the lag suffering from lag and you can choose whether or not you want to play with Cross-play on or off which determines how long it takes to find matches which I did have issues finding some matches outside of Quick Playlist when I disabled Cross-Play. I did have some disconnections which happened a total of four times including an actual game crash as well but these didn't ruin the experience for me overall. I even had one moment where some of the controls didn't work properly when I first booted up the game and I had to restart it to fix that.
Despite some minor internet connections and how I feel about the round-based setup for matches, Splitgate 2 seems to be heading in a positive direction. 1047 Games have still got a couple of ways to go of refining the game mechanics, adding more game modes to it alongside adding more features. I look forward to seeing more future updates for this game with what new things are going to happen with this game and also what will happen with the original Splitgate in the next few days. I do hope that more comes to this game because of the potential for evolving the formula that the original Splitgate built up and there is room to improve on that. I do hope that they improve waiting times for searching for matches, they add AI Bot matches to the game in case servers take too long to find matches and hope we get the Waiting Room back to warm up and practice while waiting for matches to start. There is still more to come within the next couple of months before the full release, hopefully we will be to customize our characters and weapons with different skins and also record stats.
As of making this First Impression Blog 1047 Games have said that there will be another chance to play the game again with a Beta coming out this May which will offer up more things to try out than what we experienced with the Open Alpha.
Wherever 1047 Games really goes with this sequel I am more than ready to step through the portal into a sequel that is actually looking to improve from what the original did and actually maybe do things better unlike what happened with some other live service shooters that got sequels. Yes, I'm looking at you Overwatch 2.
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