When 1047 Games launched Splitgate on Steam in 2019, the player base was small, reviews were mixed, and the game — a school project of Stanford students, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian — seemed destined to die a slow, unremarkable death in a battlefield littered with also-rans. But true to its form, just when it looked like Splitgate was backed into a corner, it built a portal, teleported to the other side of the room, and shot its opponent in the back of the head. Two years and $10 million later, Splitgate’s beta arrived on consoles and exploded with 600,000 downloads in its first week.
Such unexpected success led to a cavalcade of server issues. But within a few weeks’ time, this tiny team of developers had beefed up the operation at every turn. Now that those dark days of two-hour-long queue times are over and done with, not only should you play Splitgate, it’s time to talk about some basic tips to help newcomers not get annihilated. Well, you’ll probably still get annihilated, but you can give some back.
Aggression Is the Better Part of Valor
I have a confession to make: I am a camper (I know, I know, go ahead and call me whatever names you want, I’ll wait). I prefer slow, conservative approaches when playing first-person shooters; whether it’s Call of Duty, Battlefield, or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, I am always seeking out sniper rifles and hidden alcoves, popping unsuspecting passersby with (lacking) precision. Such actions cause storms of profanity to fill my headset, as well as constant assaults on my manhood. Despite this firing squad of insults, it is who I am, and so I wanted to bring this slow, conservative approach into Splitgate.
LOL.
From one conservative player to another, this approach is not going to work. Not only is the general pace of play on the faster end of the spectrum, the ability to spawn portals, and subsequently teleport around the maps at high speeds, makes the idea of any one spot being safe almost laughable. The aggression that I am proposing doesn’t have to be reckless — if you run blindly into the field, you will be dispatched quickly and unceremoniously — but you do have to be willing to get on your horse and go. The maps are the right size to guarantee you’re never too far from the next encounter, so even as the bullets fly, you’ll end up scoring a few kills among the chaos. Don’t worry about dying; it’s inevitable in Splitgate, but respawns are fast, and you’ll be ready to die again in no time.
Learn to Love Your Starting Weapons
The carbine and assault rifle are the two weapons you begin each (unranked) round with, and lucky for you, both of these weapons are pretty damn good. The additional weapons littered around the map — sniper rifle, rocket launcher, railgun, etc. — will offer variance in playstyle, but not necessarily variance in effectiveness (I know players who are lethal with only the assault rifle). The carbine gives you a medium-to-long-range option, where the assault rifle devastates at close quarters.
Yes, there are those bastards who can hit you with a railgun from anywhere, but that’s not because the railgun is super-powered; it’s because that particular player is. Your trusty carbine and assault rifle will more than hold the fort in almost every encounter. The general usefulness of these weapons doesn’t end with their individual strengths, though, which brings us to the next tip:
Gentlemen, Swap Your Weapons
The natural combination of the two starting weapons is where their effectiveness shines. The carbine is a slower, three-to-four-shot-kill weapon, where the assault rifle is your standard low-damage, rapid-fire piece. The carbine-plus-assault-rifle provides a built-in “Pop, pop, weapon switch, machine-gun-until-dead” combo that works great.
Weapon swapping in Splitgate is fast, so the same principle that is true for the carbine and assault rifle remains true for other weapons. As someone with a lot of experience with slow-loading sniper rifles in first-person shooters, the predictable black hole you fall into is that for those inevitable times you don’t finish off your target, you’re wholly and totally screwed. Here in Splitgate, where maps are more often taller than longer, quickly switching to your assault rifle to deal the final damage makes for an effective blend of gameplay styles.
Use Your Portals (Because You Need the High Ground, Anakin)
Given Splitgate’s fast pace, it’s an easy temptation for new players to avoid the seemingly complicated world of portaling. While mastering the use of portals is something that takes time — and something still regrettably on my to-do list — learning the basics of how to use them isn’t difficult. Even if you aren’t ready to portal around the map like a hyperactive pinball (some players are nuts with their portals), you can use them to satiate your desire to slow the game down. A well-placed portal, combined with your ability to shoot through them, can lead to excellent ambush opportunities. Just don’t stay in your portal too long.
Perhaps the more important reason to use portals is their ability to get you around the map quickly. It might occasionally be valuable to hastily reach the other side of a map, but it’s borderline required to be able to literally get higher. As previously mentioned, most maps have more height than length, and are labyrinths of interlocking levels that can be very difficult (sometimes impossible) to traverse without using a portal. If you’re buried on the bottom of those maps, you will be hard-pressed to survive long enough to have any kind of consistent success.
Don’t Avoid Enemy Portals, Either
With so much going on, it can be tempting to block out any tangential thing happening around you that isn’t a physical player with a gun. Portals pop up constantly, and while it’s easy to not pay attention to them, it’s even easier to get brutalized by them for that lack of attention. Not only can you see that someone is standing in a portal because of how it pulsates, but your crosshair will also turn red when you hover over it. Even if you aren’t in a position to close the portal, a few bullets fired across the bow might lessen the enemy’s resolve (and maybe get you a kill).
However, you also have two EMP grenades (and can pick up additional), the sole purpose of which is to close enemy portals. While players have the ability to immediately reconstruct their portals — I would like to see 1047 Games add some kind of 5-10 second cooldown period to portal building, but that’s just me — you can significantly disrupt opponent rhythm by chucking these grenades. Closing portals isn’t going to hamstring great players from killing you, but when you’re new, you need every small advantage you can muster. And if you’re playing in a team environment, your teammates will thank you for it.
Splitgate makes good on its claim of being “easy to pick up, difficult to master.” With these few tips under your belt, you’ll at least be killing as often as you’re dying in no time.