Indus: India's latest battle royale game reveals gameplay trailer

Pune-based studio, SuperGaming, on Republic Day revealed the gameplay trailer of its upcoming highly-anticipated battle royale title, Indus.

The popular Indian game publisher dropped a gameplay trailer showcasing Indus's unique blend of Indian classical music with futuristic hip-hop and an array of Indian characters, known as Paragons. The gameplay trailer revealed how players can explore, loot, survive and win on a map called Virlok, which is a floating island in the sky. Virlok looks like a futuristic take on Indian culture with architecture inspired by India and lush greenery.

For the uninitiated, battle royale is a genre of video games where multiple players are dropped into a virtual map either alone or in groups and the objective is to scavenge loot and eliminate other players until one person or group is the only one to be left alive.

SuperGaming's goal is not just to create a great game, they want to put India on the global gaming map. To do so, the studio revealed the first trailer of Indus in New York’s Times Square and subsequently aired the gameplay trailer across various locations in London.

In terms of graphics, the game looks very familiar. One could say it is a blend between the popular first-person shooter Valorant and EA's flagship battle-royale game, Apex Legends. This was confirmed by the company in a press release where it wrote, "Valorant, Apex Legends, Transformers, Iron Man, and Black Panther are some of the primary entertainment franchises which have strongly influenced some of our key creative decisions related to visuals of the game. We are continuously sourcing a lot of our gameplay inspiration from some great modern shooter franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo to name a few."

Additionally, the trailer also showed players switching between third-person and first-person views, although it's not yet clear if players will be able to switch mid-game or if there will be separate modes for the two. For now, the gameplay showed only four characters: Adam, Sir-Taj, Adya and Big Gaj. The studio has yet to confirm if there will be any other characters besides the four come launch day.

The game is yet to get a release date, however, SuperGaming will hold multiple community playtests throughout the year across several Indian cities for beta testing and marketing purposes.

For now, the Pre-registration for Indus is now live on the Google Play Store for Android with iOS pre-registrations to be available soon, SuperGaming stated. Users will be eligible to receive exclusive surprises for pre-registrations, the company added.