From a team of veteran developers with Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield games on their résumé, Scavengers takes the battle royale and spins it in several new directions at once. Gone is the usual rinse-and-repeat hunt for kills, in its place a fresh mix of PvE and PvP combat, survival mechanics and a deep upgrade system that takes you all around the map arming yourself with better gear than the next team.
It’s not about k:d here. Scavengers is about working as a rock-solid unit to secure resources and get the heck out of the frozen tundra full of maniacs with all the riches you bagged. That makes teamwork your best weapon - here’s how to make it work for you and your squadmates.
1. Get everyone in agreement before starting a fight
Here more than any other battle royale, you want to make a risk assessment before squeezing the trigger. Not only are the 60 players in one match all out to get each other, what makes Scavengers unique is that they may also be at totally different phases of the round when they meet. If you’ve been drawn towards a bunch of small ammo dumps with little downtime for salvaging scrap and investing in better gear, good luck to you if you open fire on a team who’ve been aggressively tooling up all round.
All great teams are built on the bedrock of good comms, and in Scavengers it starts with getting everyone agreed whether you’re taking on this scrap or playing the odds and sneaking away - at least until you can return with more resources to spend on killer weaponry.
2. Lean into your Explorer’s unique skills
We’ve all played plenty of shooters where every character and class secretly boils down to ‘shooter of enemies’, but Scavengers isn’t one. With the elements against you and a fresh mix of PvE and PvP combat to navigate, your Explorer’s weapon and ability matter. But what matters more is how they combine with those of the other Explorers you’re with.
Supports like Halden and Letty are vital, providing healing and enemy tech debuffs respectively - but they’re not going to get too far into a match if they don’t have someone like Cruz or Valora taking point in gunfights. Of course, the same goes for Cruz and Valora if they team up without any support roles to complement them.
To really get your team ticking over like clockwork, spend some time experimenting with Explorer combos and approach the whole match with their distinct role in mind.
3. Collect resources together, spend it as a team
When you pick up scrap, tactical stash resources and even rare drops from bosses, you share all those items as a team. It’s like having a joint bank account, only with a lot more high calibre weapons on the balance sheet. And also like a shared account, it’s best to talk it through before splurging on something.
Because you’ll need different resources in different phases of the game. Early on the elements themselves might be your biggest enemy so you’ll agree as a team to invest in Thermal Boost from your research options. In the late game, however, the action swings towards frantic PvP standoffs as the last teams alive fight for a spot on the dropship before it leaves. It goes without saying that shields are a good idea for that phase.
By talking things through with everybody, you’re all on the same page about what you’re going to do next and the equipment you need to do it. No one cares about your fancy weapon if you go all round without having to fire it.
4. Split up - at the right moments
There’s a lot to do on the map: securing tactical stashes full of different resource types, raiding PvE strongholds, taking out boss targets for top-level loot, freezing to death in the frozen wastes… it’s all here. With so many routes towards upgrading your team, it actually pays to split up and send different players off towards their own objectives.
Sending more than one player towards a small resource point might prove overkill, while just two of you may be capable of dealing with a PvE point. If you know what you’re going into and how reliably one or two of your team can tackle it, multitasking will massively accelerate your upgrade path so that you’re brimming with weapons and armour by the final fight for dropship spaces. And if one of you is ambushed by another team while you’re off on a solo run, keep reading…
5. Take other teams by surprise
The radar is one of your most useful tools out there in the frozen tundra, revealing nearby enemies each time the circle emanating from your player blips and registers them moving. But that’s the key - they have to be moving. It can’t see static or crouching players.
Use that to your advantage by communicating as a squad when to go stealthy, hit crouch and move slowly and silently together. This will give you the jump on nearby enemies who haven’t established a visual contact on you, and now they’re not getting any indication from their radars either. Time to open fire and teach them some observation skills.
