What Does R.I.S.E Mean for Supercell’s Action RPG Strategy?

Supercell went five years without a game making it to global launch.

The studio pulled no punches when it came to killing games, but the team eventually broke this streak with the release of Squad Busters on May 29th.

The launch was quickly followed up with another game announcement from Supercell in the form of Project R.I.S.E, a game built from the ashes of Clash Heroes.

R.I.S.E is intended to be a new multiplayer action-focused RPG game, which sounds familiar because Supercell is working on another action RPG, mo.co. It doesn’t end there, either, since the studio invested in Phantom Gamelabs, which is also currently working on an action looter shooter game, Riftbusters. 

Are all of these games going to create competition among themselves and end up cannibalizing each other, or is Supercell looking to dominate the genre? 

After recently getting hands-on experience with Project R.I.S.E, game design expert Jakub Remiar shares his thoughts on these questions and digs deeper into the concept of Supercell’s latest game.

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Supercell has just completed its European pre-alpha test of R.I.S.E, the newly announced action RPG game that builds on the foundations of Clash Heroes. We can’t assess what was changed from Clash Heroes, as there are just a few trailers on the internet, but we can assume there were radical changes in the context of core gameplay.

At present, there are actually three action RPGs connected to Supercell.

The game is now a roguelite with extraction elements. This comes as a little bit of a surprise to me, as I was expecting a similar scenario to Squad Busters and Floodrush. This was last year when Supercell mentioned two similar squad-based battle royale games in soft launch at the same time, and shortly after the announcement, it discontinued Flood Rush. 

At present, there are three action RPGs connected to Supercell.

One is mo.co, which was announced last October. It’s a streamlined action RPG that is PvE-based. Then there is R.I.S.E, where cooperation is pretty much mandatory, as there is matchmaking before each level with rogue-lite and extraction elements.

The trio’s last game is Riftbusters, developed by Phantom Gamelabs, which Supercell invested in last year in May. On the surface, Riftbusters looks very similar to the setup of mo.co, a streamlined PvE action RPG. The art even has a similar sci-fi vibe. 

R.I.S.E, as mentioned (based on the pre-alpha experience), is a different sub-genre of action RPGs.

We can’t put it into the same basket as mo.co and Riftbusters. The rogue-lite element of the game is a core mechanic that is adjusted for co-op-based gameplay.

Players take turns choosing one of three perks in a 30-second timer. If the first player chooses an ability, it is replaced by a new one in the choice of the three, which the second player is now choosing from. Then comes the third player. You can even favorite the abilities when other players are choosing to give them a hint of what they should pick. 

The other very interesting twist is the extraction element.

Once the players beat the floor boss, they win the level and choose abilities they will bring to the next floor.

The testing build of R.I.S.E was the most early test build in a game life cycle that I have seen from Supercell.

However, instead of immediately starting on the next floor, they are taken to the main menu after this window, where the game announces that they can now start on a higher floor. They will again need to be matched with different players, and they can even choose a different hero during this time, as there are six heroes in the pre-alpha. 

By understanding these mechanics you can clearly see that the pacing of this game will be very different from your usual “Diablo-like” action RPG where you mostly defeat monsters, upgrade gear and rinse and repeat.

It seems that with the investment in Phantom Gamelabs, Supercell also acquired a boost in expertise in mobile action RPGs.

The testing build of R.I.S.E was the early test build in a game life cycle that I have seen from Supercell. All of their other games were tested much further in their feature production. Here, it was just a barebones core.

You could clearly see that they were looking for rogue-lite and cooperative players based on the games they were asking about in the registration questionnaire, where names such as Archero, Hades, Helldivers 2, and Binding of Isaac were mentioned. 

This leaves me very hopeful.

It seems that with the investment in Phantom Gamelabs, Supercell also acquired a boost in expertise in mobile action RPGs, which is now clearly being utilized in their newly tested games.

My guess is that mo.co and Riftbusters can coexist together, as they are in different company portfolios.

Even though Mo.co and Riftbusters seem like competitors, R.I.S.E is clearly a bold iteration of the genre, which was always Supercell’s forte. It is definitely not that direct a competitor to the previous games.

My guess is that mo.co and Riftbusters can coexist together, as they are in different company portfolios, but of course, the expectation is that mo.co will be the bigger one if it is launched. On the other hand, R.I.S.E will live independently of these two, as it lived before during its time as Clash Heroes, and will attack its own market sub-genre. 

Supercell is really trying many new ideas with its Clash IP, as we saw in April 2021, when the three Clash games were announced.

Maybe now, because the build is so early in production for R.I.S.E, Supercell will start getting external feedback much sooner in their pipeline to avoid the “fast killing” of pretty finished games as it used to.

Other companies at this stage would probably double down on “sure hits” such as Clash of Clans 2 or Hay Day 2, which usually leads to mostly diminishing returns.

The latest example could be Zenless Zone Zero, where MiHoYo really got diminishing returns. The metagame is pretty much the same, and the target audience is the same; only the core is much faster-paced and has closed combat rather than the slower open world of Genshin.

By mobile revenue comparison, in the first 11 days after launch, Genshin earned $60 million, Honkai Star Rail earned $90 million, and Zenless Zone Zero earned $33 million (based on Sensor Tower).