Supercell’s new game “Squad Busters” is enthralling

Squad Busters is a mobile action game developed by Supercell and released May 28, 2024. It features characters from Supercell’s other games, namely Hayday, Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans. The game is a mix of player vs environment (PVE) and player versus player (PVP) gameplay.

Squad Busters has become one of my favorite games to play over the month or two that I’ve played it. It’s a game that’s really easy to pick up and play, but between team building, knowing when you’re strong enough to PVP and understanding your win conditions, there’s a surprising amount of depth to the game. 

Players win games of Squad Busters by having the most gems at the end of a three minute timer. Games are absolutely insane when all ten players survive until the end and have fully built squads. Every input counts, and players need to be careful not to get flanked or outmaneuvered by their opponents. 

Squad Busters is extremely similar to an auto chess game with a little more micro control over characters. The base gameplay of Squad Busters is players growing single character into a team that can defeat late game bosses, survive PVP, and end with the highest gem score.

Enemies are scattered across the map that drop gold and gems. There are also several other neutral objectives scattered around the map, such as trees and carrots that certain characters can harvest for resources.

One of my favorite units is “Trader,” who gives you gems every time you collect a set amount of coins. If you combine him with other units that are good at collecting coins, you can collect an absolutely insane amount of gems. Players unlock Trader for free at “world journey” level 36.

Before every game, players are given a “deck” of characters they’re assigned for the round. While making every game more diverse and a different experience than the last, it also forces characters to win in different ways and learn to play with different characters.

Players can exchange gold for characters at chests, where they’re provided one selection from three. Chest prices scale with how many characters a player has in their squad. Each character has a unique ability that brings something new to the team. When players collect three copies of a character, they will also “fuse,” becoming a stronger version of themselves and reducing chest prices for future characters.

Similar to Clash Royale at launch, units come in three tiers; common, rare, and epic. As the game progresses, chests are weighted towards giving commons, rares, then epics respectively. There isn’t much of a difference between common and rare characters except for their abilities, though epics have notably better health and damage. 

Units are also broken down into different roles, such as healer, supplier, tank, and attacker.

A gold currency and fusion mechanic also exists outside of core gameplay which players can use to upgrade their units. These upgrades give units additional abilities, or improve existing ones. There’s no way around it — this is a pay-to-win mechanic — but — at the time of writing this review — it also feels like it has minimal impact on gameplay. With ten other players in the game, and being able to win games purely through PVE, it’s something that I’ve hardly noticed while playing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t matter, it is something to be aware of.

The game has extremely simple controls, with a joystick to move your squad around, and a turbo that increases squad move and attack speed. Characters move automatically to harvest resources or engage in combat. There’s also an additional joystick for spells, which players can aim at opposing squads or enemies.

So what about Squad Busters is so fun? Seeing how crazy ten player games get towards the end, and the resource collection loop. I also think playing towards different win cons with the random unit assignment is really fun.

There are a lot of players that are turned off by the constant PVE gameplay loop of Squad Busters, but I find balancing PVP and PVE fascinating. Do you try and play to kill other squads, or do you play to kill neutral enemies in the center of the map?

Knowing you have to try and force a fight with another squad as the clock ticks down, or avoid PVP like the plague because you built your team wrong feels rewarding whenever you adapt and play the way your squad needs.

As someone who plays games somewhat competitively, Squad Busters manages to combine competitive PVP with party games. Matches are only three minutes long, so if you lose, it’s no big deal. Just go play the next game.

One of my favorite parts of the game are also the “battle mods,” which are similar different game modes. These mods do everything from drop spells everywhere on the map, to have players herd and steal chickens worth gems away from one another. Combined with the random character assignment, it gives the game tons of variety and replayability. 

The introduction of different mods can also leave my beloved Trader a useless unit, while making hated units such as “Dynamike” really strong. It all contributes to the game’s variety in a unique way. 

There are also a lot of cool micro things you can do with units such as “Miner” and “Barbarian King.” Their crowd control (CC) can single handedly win or lose you a fight if you manage to stun an opponent’s weaker units and kill them before the stun ends.

Players can also set up mini “farms” with spells like cannon — which essentially places a friendly turret at a given location to kill neutral enemies, allowing players to run past and collect gold and gems. The unit Pam also builds a friendly turret upon opening up a chest, and I think playing around these minor things is really interesting.

I do feel obligated to mention that I haven’t played the game at the highest level — the Squad League — but I’m not sure if many players have reached there anyways. The biggest difference between Squad League and normal games is that everyone plays the same deck of characters, and all lobbies are filled with human players.

Which brings us to one of the downsides of Squad Busters. Lobbies are typically filled with 

anywhere from three to seven bot players. To my knowledge, Supercell hasn’t officially communicated why, but my own theory is that it helps game queue times. 

With that being said, most of the downsides to Squad Busters were actually addressed in their most August updates. The devs removed multiple pay-to-win mechanics from the game, reworked the “lucky find” mechanic to be less oppressive, and they reworked the turbo button and squad movement to make it more fluid.

The reason why I bring this up is because it’s a huge when game developers actually listen to their player bases and care about their game. It gives me lots of hope for the future of a game that hasn’t been super popular off launch.

Squad Busters is free to play for mobile devices. For information and a direct download link, visit squadbusters.supercell.com/en/.