Game Analysis: What does Project RISE mean for Supercell’s action RPG strategy?

• Project R.IS.E is Supercell’s newly announced action RPG game that builds on the foundations of Clash Heroes
• Supercell is also developing the action RPG game mo.co, while one of its investment portfolio companies, Phantom Gamelabs, is working on Riftbusters.

Supercell hasn’t released a game worldwide for five years. The studio has no qualms about canceling games, but with the release of Squad Busters on May 29, the team has ended that streak.

The release was quickly followed by the announcement of another game from Supercell in the form of Project RISE, a game created from the remnants of Clash Heroes.

RISE is set to be a new multiplayer action RPG game, which sounds familiar since Supercell is working on another action RPG, mo.co. And that’s not all, as the studio has invested in Phantom Gamelabs, which is also currently working on an action looter shooter game called Riftbusters.

Will all these games compete with each other and cannibalize each other or will Supercell try to dominate the genre?

Having recently gained hands-on experience with Project RISE, game design expert Jakub Remiar shares his thoughts on these questions and delves deeper into the concept of Supercell’s latest game.

Supercell has just completed its European pre-alpha testing of RISE, the newly announced action RPG game that builds on the foundations of Clash Heroes. We can’t really judge what has been changed compared to Clash Heroes since there are few trailers online, but we can assume that there have been radical changes in the context of the core gameplay.

The game is now a roguelite with extraction elements. This surprises me a little, as I was expecting a similar scenario to Squad Busters and Floodrush. That was last year when Supercell simultaneously mentioned two similar squad-based battle royale games in soft launch and canceled Flood Rush shortly after the announcement.

There are actually three action RPGs currently linked to Supercell.

One of them is mo.co, which was announced last October. It’s a really streamlined action RPG based on PvE. Then there’s RISE, where cooperation is pretty much mandatory as there’s matchmaking before each level with roguelite and extraction elements.

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

RISE, as mentioned (based on the pre-alpha experience), is basically a different subgenre of action RPGs, so we can’t really put it in the same box as mo.co and Riftbusters. The roguelite element of the game is a core mechanic adapted to cooperative gameplay.

Players take turns choosing one of three perks within a 30-second timer. When the first player chooses a skill, it is replaced with a new one in the selection of three that the second player can now choose from. Then comes the third player. You can even mark skills as favorites as other players choose to give them a hint as to what they should choose.

The other very interesting twist is the extraction element. Once players defeat the floor boss, they win the level and can choose skills to take with them to the next floor.

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

Once you understand these mechanics, you can clearly see that the pace of this game is very different from that of a typical “Diablo-like” action RPG, where you mostly defeat monsters, upgrade your equipment, and repeat.

The test build of RISE was the earliest test build in a game’s lifecycle that I’ve seen from Supercell. All other games were tested much more extensively in their main production. Here it was just a barebones core.

That they were looking for roguelite and co-op players was evident from the games they asked about in the registration questionnaire, which included names like Archero, Hades, Helldivers 2, and Binding of Isaac.

This gives me great hope. It seems that with the investment in Phantom Gamelabs, Supercell has also expanded its expertise in the field of mobile action RPGs, which is now clearly evident in the newly tested games.

While Mo.co and Riftbusters may seem like competitors, RISE is clearly a bold iteration of the genre that has always been Supercell’s forte. It’s definitely not as direct a competitor to the previous games.

I appreciate that mo.co and Riftbusters can co-exist since they are in different company portfolios, but of course it is expected that mo.co will be the bigger one when it launches. RISE, on the other hand, will exist independently of these two, just as it previously existed in its time as Clash Heroes, and will attack its own market subgenre.

Supercell is really trying out a lot of new ideas with its Clash IP, as we saw in April 2021 when the three Clash games were announced. Perhaps now that the build for RISE is so early in production, Supercell will start getting external feedback much earlier in its pipeline to avoid the “quick drop” of fairly finished games like they used to do.

Other companies at this stage would likely double down on “surefire hits” like Clash of Clans 2 or Hay Day 2, which typically result in mostly diminishing returns.

The most recent example might be Zenless Zone Zero, where MiHoYo really experienced diminishing returns. The metagame is pretty much the same and the target audience is the same; just the core is much faster and features close-quarter combat instead of the slower open world of Genshin.

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

For a more detailed overview of RISE, check out the Two and Half Gamers podcast.

Edited by Paige Cook