Escalation’s a 5v5 mode where both teams race to work through 12 randomly-generated weapons and abilities. These loadouts will get worse as time goes by, to the point where you’ll be facing off against one another with some of Valorant’s most basic weaponry. More often than not, this weapon will be a knife, and the idea of a five person squad hoofing it around the map looking for a slice sounds like a lot of fun. If you’ve played CS:Source, CS:GO, or most multiplayer shooters nowadays, Escalation may sound mighty similar to Gun Game. A mode in which you also race opponents through a set number of weapons. And that’s because it is. Mode designer Kyle Leach said that they wanted “to take the fun and excitement of progressing through weapons and make it feel truly team based”. I mean, I’m sold on this. Sometimes I’ve felt like I needed a break from Valorant’s default, very serious main mode, but I’m not feeling Spike Rush or Team Deathmatch. If the chaos of most Gun Games are anything to go by, Escalation could be the laugh-inducer I’ve wanted from the game for a long while.
