Supercell announced the project under a new IP. It’s called Flood Rush

What happened?

On Monday, without much fanfare, a public, but time-limited (from May 29 to June 7) beta test of the Squad Busters game began, about which nothing was known until that moment (including the very fact of its existence).

What kind of game?

Briefly, Flood Rush can be described as a mix of Clash Royale and League of Legends with elements of a royal battle. Also, in many aspects, the game is very close to another Supercell project — Squad Busters, which passed a similar test a week earlier, but was announced much earlier, in January.

The core at the concept level looks like this: eight players are sent to the PvP arena, slowly going under the water, where they collect small armies of mobs and fight them with each other.

As for the gameplay itself, it is a little more difficult to describe it:

• the player starts by choosing one of the gers (here they are called seekers — seekers) and goes to them on the island;
• the hero is controlled on the island by taps, they do not need to shoot and aim, only activate a special feature at the right moment (each hero has its own);
• the hero is constantly followed by several squads of mobs called up by the player (they are called for the local equivalent of mana, which falls out when killing opponents);
• the player can only summon those mobs whose cards he found on the island during a particular session;
• in this regard, each game session can be divided into two stages: in the first, the player searches for cards (no more than four in his hand) and fights with neutral mobs, rocking the army, and in the second, he tries to defeat the enemy’s armies.

Only one should be left alive.

What is the state of the game?

Flood Rush cannot be called crude, unfinished, or even in need of significant polishing. However, while there is little content in the game, there is no store (and, in general, monetization as such) and, as far as can be understood from the few streams so far, there are problems with both dynamics and balance.

So why is it still worth paying attention to the news about the announcement / beta release?

Let’s start with the fact that this is still a new game from Supercell. Each of her projects, which reached the release, set new standards in mobile gaming.

Secondly, we are talking about a completely new IP for the company — with a new style, universe, heroes.

But it is important to make a clarification here. The studio currently has five games in development. Now we know about four of them:

• Clash Mini — 17 months in early access;
• Clash Heroes — the latest news about the game was in November 2021, but unlike Clash Quest, it was not officially closed;
• Squad Busters — the project has managed to pass two open betas and is actively promoted;
• the just-announced Flood Rush.

Two of the five projects under development are completely built on the popular IP. As for Squad Busters, this is a compromise story for the company. On the one hand, there is no formal link to the old brands, but all its characters are taken from other IP owned by Supercell.

Thirdly, according to the current beta, it is clear that the company has finally switched to a new format for launching games. Now she checks them publicly at much earlier stages (including when there is no monetization yet). The company has not switched to this practice right now. For the first time, it was tested on Clash Mini, which survived at least one time-limited beta before entering softlonch.

Fourth, Supercell has not previously publicly tested two projects in parallel that could potentially cannibalize each other’s audiences. As noted above, at the level of the basic concept, Squad Busters and Flood Rush are very close to each other.

What will happen to the project next?

The game can easily be closed. Supercell is known as a serial killer of its own projects. Here, perhaps, a lot depends on the results that it will show as part of the beta testing currently underway.

However, the history of the same Squad Busters shows that there may be several public tests. And from test to test, the game can change significantly, and with it the metrics it demonstrates.

Plus, do not forget the example of Brawl Stars, which changed a lot during the softlonch and which was as close as possible to closing at different stages of development.

By the way, now a similar process is taking place in Clash Mini, which, for example, in the latest update promises to reduce the number of currencies from eight to one. That is, quite large changes are taking place.