Recently, Ubisoft uploaded a trailer to YouTube and posted some teasers on Twitter announcing playtests for a new game – BattleCore Arena. With a short clip, Ubisoft showcased a bizarre-looking game in which the players assume control of mechanised balls that fire explosive lasers at each other while taking advantage of gravity and high-octane movement mechanics to bounce around the screen.
I’m as confused as you are.
What is BattleCore Arena?
There’s almost no information online about BattleCore Arena, save for the fact that it was developed by Cosmic Ray Studio, a French studio with almost no online profile, and it was released back in 2017. It debuted on Steam more than six years ago, and the SteamDB profile for the game shows that it underwent a cleansing in 2022, with most of the game’s assets and information being stripped from the platform.
The last update for the game was in May 2023, but if you try searching for it now, you’ll see that there’s nothing there.
Now, as 2024 kicks off, Ubisoft has ‘announced’ the impending arrival of the exact same game. It’s identical – promotional art for the original BattleCore Arena is the same as the graphics shown in the new trailer.
Strangely, the Twitter profile for the game posted a message inviting players to take part in the technical test that runs from the 1st to the 5th of February – the profile’s first post since February 2020. At the time of writing, the profile boasts just 153 followers. But bizarrely enough, the introduction to BattleCore Arena, a free-to-play arena-based shooter, was made on Ubisoft’s premier Twitter profile, with 10.6 million followers.
Here’s the game’s description:
BattleCore Arena is a free to play competitive platform shooter where gravity mastery is the key to victory. Use your trusted weapons and abilities to eject your opponents out of the arena in style. Glory awaits you, take the plunge!
We’ve reached out to Ubisoft to see if we can glean a little more information on this ‘new’ game. At present, we can only assume that Ubisoft quietly acquired the game years ago and has been working on it in the background since.
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