After a few rounds of beta testing, Black Desert Online's battle royale cousin Shadow Arena has now been unleashed onto Steam Early Access. As you might imagine given the premise, Shadow Arena allows 40 players to roam across its map in search of monsters and loot, all the while beating each other senseless with a variety of unique characters. Each one has their own special skillset and playstyle, as well as the usual strengths and weaknesses, so learning how to utilize or exploit all of them is going to be where most of the challenge lies.

As for what exactly the combat looks like in action, that you'll find out through one of the character trailers down below. This one is mostly focused on Yeonhwa and her various combo attacks, so it should give you a pretty good impression of what Shadow Arena has to offer. Have a gander:

While I haven't played the launch version of Shadow Arena, from what I can tell it would appear that it still suffers from the same issue as the recent beta - character balance. Some are simply far more powerful than their competition, and with a fair few characters being locked away behind a paywall, that's not exactly a pleasant thing to deal with. So if you're interested in Shadow Arena and want to give it a proper try, it might be prudent to wait for a couple of weeks, just for the first few rounds of balance changes to go live.

Either way, you can learn more about Shadow Arena, as well as start playing yourself, over at Steam. Have fun!