I was called a “regurgitated cum bubble” within the first minutes of booting up Gunzilla’s free-to-play battle royale shooter, Off The Grid. And the crass insult wasn’t shouted by another player, but by an obnoxious soldier dude who is the game’s announcer. Things only got worse and weirder from there.
I didn’t know what to expect when booting up Off The Grid. But since launching in early access in October 2024, the game has been marketed heavily on the PlayStation Store and has now leapt to Steam after previously being exclusive to the Epic Game Store on PC. To help promote Off The Grid’s Steam launch, sites like Polygon, IGN, and even Kotaku itself ran sponsored posts about the game. These posts championed its frequent updates, “strong following,” and heavily mentioned that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp helped create Off The Grid’s world. So, I decided to finally check out OTG, as the kids call it, and see what this game is all about!
After an admittedly well-produced intro video, I was introduced to Master Sergeant Cobra, perhaps the most annoying video game man I’ve ever met. After his lovely “cum bubble” insult, he explained the basic premise of Off The Grid. It’s a third-person battle royale in which you try to survive while also finding valuable loot that you can extract mid-game and sell to other players later. More on that in a bit.
So, what is Off The Grid?
Then the game tossed me into a match. And sadly, Cobra was still in my ear, yelling at me, saying things like: “Come on, you chickenshit pussies!” and “Your safe zone is collapsing.” And best of all, you get to hear these same insults over and over. Fun stuff. So happy I’m here.
The actual gameplay of Off The Grid isn’t groundbreaking. You jump out of a plane, land on a map, find weapons and loot, fight other players, and hopefully end up the last team standing. In my first match, most of the players I encountered seemed to be bots. Looking online, this seems to be a common problem. Also looking online, I spotted a lot of players worried the game was going to get shut down soon because it takes a long time to find matches, and often you get paired with bots.
When I finally ran into a real player, or what seemed to be a real player, they were dressed like Donald Trump. Trump and Kamala Harris are skins you can buy in the game’s store. Trump’s skin has a “No Woke” sticker. After playing a few matches, I saw a lot of real players running around in the Trump skin. I’ll let you decide what that means about Off The Grid’s playerbase.
After a few hours of winning and losing, I had figured out what Off The Grid was: It’s a so-so third-person battle royale with a few neat ideas buried under a ton of garbage and bullshit. Gunplay feels snappy enough, but movement feels floaty in a way that makes it hard to control my character. Being able to swap out your limbs on the fly with new ones you find or loot off dead players is cool, and some of the limbs have unique power-ups that can help. Sadly, most of my time in Off The Grid was spent looking for other players to fight and waiting for matches to start.
Remember NFTs? Gunzilla hopes not
In all those previously mentioned sponsored posts advertising the game, they all failed to reveal that this is an NFT/blockchain game. Remember how I mentioned that you can extract loot during matches and sell it to other players? Well, it’s all NFTs, baby.
I earned a rare arm and sold it for 60 GUN (Gunzilla’s cryptotoken) to another player. Each item has a unique code, and it seems there’s a finite amount available. When I completed my sale, I checked my transaction history, and it was labeled as being part of my “GUNZ Wallet.” However, because I’m on Xbox Series X/S, I don’t actually have access to my GUNZ Wallet or the GUN tokens inside it. This seems to be because Xbox, PlayStation, and Valve won’t allow Gunzilla to tie the actual blockchain into the game. (On the Epic Store, all of that stuff is functional and active in the game.) I don’t know what this means for the GUN tokens that I earned from selling the arm. Can I ever cash them out for real dollars? Will any user-sold items I buy on Xbox be available in future Gunzilla games?
Gunzilla, the company that now owns Game Informer, has tried to downplay all of this NFT/Blockchain crap despite cutting deals with companies in the industry. That seems to be because they understand that a lot of people hate all that crap. In an FAQ posted on Off The Grid’s official website, they respond to people asking if this is an NFT game:
Off The Grid is not an NFT game. It’s a battle royale game with an optional NFT element. If you want to try out NFTs, you can; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. It’s entirely up to the player how they want to play the game, and the game is playable without dipping into NFTs.
And that’s true, in the sense that you can play games and never do anything with the loot you earn from matches. But that seems to be a big part of the gameplay loop built into Off The Grid, so ignoring NFTs and the player marketplace seems like a bad way to experience the game.
Of course, the real question is: Do you want to experience Off The Grid? If we ignore the NFT shit, the actual game isn’t much to write home about. I struggled to find real players both before the match started and after I was in the game. Combat is fine, but if I’m going to play a third-person battle royale, I’d rather play Fortnite. And the game’s entire attitude just sucks. Being insulted over and over by the announcer gets old fast, and every inch of the game is filled with the kind of edgy jokes that 13-year-olds repeat after learning a new swear word.
So, yeah, I guess if you want to grind away at earning fake coins on the blockchain by farming rare loot in a mediocre third-person shooter, you might be the target audience for Off The Grid. For everyone else, throw a dart at a board covered in other battle royale games and play the one you hit instead. At the very least, you won’t have to deal with players dressed as Donald Trump.
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