Introduction

You might be wondering what on Earth this game is? Well, Let’s start!
Area F2 is a tactical-shooter based game. It is available on Android and iOS in there respective stores i.e. Google Play Store and Apple Store respectively. This game is a medium paced, action shooter game in which the attackers(Police) rush into a building for capturing the subject protected by defenders(Terrorists) OR killing the opposite team to win the round. It was the first CQB (Close-Quarters Battle) FPS game to be available on mobile devices. It was really a good game getting a large community support within a few days. But, what happened to this game?

The Backend

This game was made by the sub-ordinate of commerce giant Alibaba, Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. Namely, Ejoy.com with the help of Qooka games (game development studios). Ejoy was acquired by Alibaba to enter into the Mobile Gaming world. It has invested around $ 145 million (now even more) hoping to flourish its sales and to take lead in the Mobile Gaming industry in China. As of now, Tencent and NetEase are the dominating mobile gaming industries in China.

The Game

The game, even though made by a small studio, delivers the best player experience. It was a very finely made game with little to no bugs in the game itself. This game is actually a clone of one of the most popular Esports titles, namely, Rainbow Six Seige (R6S). The developers tried to replicate the same scenario as of R6S. This was done so as to bring the same experience of playing R6S on Mobile phones. It has got different classes of heroes and a wide range of different weapons (all being from R6S as it is), with the same type of environment, animations, gun models, etc. The graphics of the game were on the dull side (like in GTA 4). Pretty much everything is not as much attractive as it should be but this can be made into a big new update.

Gameplay

As you predicted, the game provides the same gameplay experience as R6S. At first, when you open the game, you will see some similarities in the UI itself. The environment it provides, the colors of the game, are pretty enough to provide you the feel of the game. When entering in a match the loading screen also seems similar to that of R6S.

A quick short comparision between Area F2 and Rainbow Six Seige. While both the games are similar, they are a little bit different from each other. R6S offers a more vivid range of colors than that seen in Area F2. The gun models were more attractive to look in R6S than in Area F2 which offers much less details and a black-greyish look to the guns. The sounds in R6S are good whereas Area F2 uses same sounds for most of the games.

The Good

-Offers a competitive scenario.
-Fun, intense, and enjoyable game.
-Getting unlockables only through playing (can pay for extra rare items).
-Addictive too. Can stick you for hours if you don’t rage quit 🙂

The Bad

-Netcode was janky. Over 100ms even in fast connection area.
-Controls were rather on the stiff and uncomfortable side. Sizing options were not upto the mark.
-Players may get toxic (rare stuff).
-Login isn’t as seamless as it should be.

I would say that this game actually delivered what it promised. These issues can be fixed with either small patch updates or one big update with adding some new stuff.

Existence was never an option.

You should be getting a idea by now that this game actually copied everything from R6S. This game can be rather called a “perfect carbon-copy” as already stated in the title. This game literally took every single thing from R6S. Therefore, it was quiet obvious for Ubisoft to take a notice on this. But you might wonder, why such a big company like Ubisoft even take a notice on this ? The answer is quiet simple, it was posing a challenge to the company. In a matter of few weeks this game was installed more than 5.6 million times and collected a revenue of $ 400,000. And as it copied everything from R6S, it was an serious act of copyright. Therefore, Ubisoft filed lawsuits against Ejoy.com, Google and Apple. It was because Google and Apple, despite knowing the fact that it infringes Ubisoft’s rights, continued to take financial benefit from this game. So, Ubisoft claims that Google and Apple cannot “avail themselves of any of the safe harbors of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

This lawsuit was filed on 15th May 2020 and 5 days later, the servers of the game were shut. The reason given by the company was ‘redesigning of the game’ (with no mention of the lawsuit) and implies relaunch of the game soon in the coming future. Although shutting down of game may resolve Ubisoft’s prayers for injunctive relief to have the defendants cease selling, marketing, and distributing AF2, Ubisoft has not yet dropped the suit and is still seeking monetary relief including actual damages and/or the defendants’ profits, or statutory damages.

My Opinion

Well, Ubisoft being such a big company, could have just ignored the game, but it seems that they do not want to leave any chances. It can also be a indicator of ubisoft launching R6S officially on mobile from there side. Who knows!
Seeing the number of downloads in a matter of 2 weeks shows us that this game was loved by people and wanted to experience something like this. I really want this game to be launched soon.

That’s it folks, thanks for reading. I hope you really enjoyed it.
Be sure to leave a comment expressing your thoughts about this game or the Blog.
Meet you in my next blog!

*Editor’s note – This game is unofficially available right now on the internet and is playable through vpn, but I would recommend you to wait for this game to be released officially.