The battle royale genre still isn’t showing any signs of dissipating and going away anytime soon, which means there will be derivative copycats popping up within the meantime. One such copycat is Alawar Premium and Blindfold’s Watchers, which at least decided not to take the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or Fortnite formula and reskin it the way Tencent and other publishers have done with their titles. Instead, Watchers is a isometric battle royale game that is free-to-play. They’re currently recruiting for testing right now, with plans to launch in the second half of 2019.

So what makes Watchers any different from the other battle royale games out there? Well, it’s set in a 1950s style neighborhood where 24 neighbors do battle against one another. The hook for the game is that there are watchers who are looking down on your every move, and when you die you can then become a watcher and enact some type of carnage against the surviving opponents, including creating anomalies or unleashing experiments on the survivors.

You can get an idea of what the gameplay is like with the trailer below.

The whole 1950s theme is a nice throwback to the kind of aesthetic we don’t see often in video games, basically because a lot of Western developers hate America and anything associated with the classic aesthetic of Americana culture.

The isometric design isn’t bad either if you’re into those sort of games. The biggest turn-off would probably be that it’s a battle royale game.

It would probably be a lot more interesting if you were playing through the game and had to deal with the random mutators enacted by the watchers while trying to track down their location and eliminate them. In fact, a game where it was a mixture of mystery problem-solving and isometric shooting would have been really cool. You have to interrogate the NPCs to find out what they know about the watchers and attempt to find or access their location before they kill you.

Anyway, the Watchers battle royale beta test is currently live right now. There are no embargos on content so expect to see plenty of Let’s Play footage popping up for the game throughout the week.

The beta test will run from today all the way up through August 4th. So you’ll be able to play test it up through the first week of August.

You can download the beta client from over on the Watchers website or you can wishlist the game by visiting the Steam store page. You can expect the full game to launch later in the year likely during the holiday season after the beta test concludes in August.