If there can be only one thing taken from my time at Riot Games' vast, lavishly fitted LA campus, it's that the mega-developer is desperately keen to prove they know what they're doing. Riot's pitch for Valorant, its upcoming tactical shooter seemingly named after a kind of industrial carpet cleaning fluid, is one based almost entirely on competence: the game will have the best infrastructure, the best attention to detail, the most committed, communicative ongoing support, and the most rigorously balanced gameplay of anything like it - even if it comes at the cost, seemingly, of character and heart and anything else like it. I've played about four hours and moment-to-moment it really is brilliant, right across the board. Exacting, oddly approachable, tense. The potential is there for Valorant to be the pinnacle of tactical shooters - but it also feels a bit back-to-front. This is a game that exists purely to excel, like the child of two parents who only agreed to conceive so their kid could ace its homework. A game that's very good at doing what other games have already done, but better.
Perhaps that impression is just a result of the way in which Riot has chosen to introduce Valorant. At times it's felt almost comically self-conscious, the developer obsessively anticipating every gripe and grizzle before it comes about. Recall the initial teaser reveal, amidst Riot's multitude of ten-year anniversary celebrations, where lead producer Anna Donlon talked at length about "Project A"'s ambition to eliminate such essential woes as "peeker's advantage", and bless the world with 128-tick servers. Sexy! Dedicated servers are old news, it seems. The schtick of schmucks. Such is the world of games, in this time of subreddit megathreads and so many direct lines from community to creator, that one of the largest developers on earth announces a massive new game by correcting their audience's complaint-jargon before they've even used it.
Still, Valorant is impressive, and as weird as it is to lead with the technical firefighting stuff, so is that. If you buy it, Riot's promises are hugely encouraging. In opening presentations at the studio, developers cited twelve games as inspiration, ranging from the obvious, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Crossfire and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (curiously, and perhaps cheekily: no mention of Overwatch), and the game itself feels like a surgical piecing together of the best of them. Each game's minor gripe or community grumble extracted and eliminated before it ever came about. To describe it in brief, imagine Counter-Strike in a just slightly more colourful world, with better attention to the little touches, from a nice little ping system to slightly more playfulness in the maps, with things like fixed teleporters allowing for baiting and flanking. Above all though, its standout addition is the highly strategic abilities, each tied to your characters ("Agents") that sit between the rigid grounding of Rainbow Six Siege's Operators and the more cartoonish skills of Overwatch.