Super Smash Bros owns the platform fighter scene, so this indie has a new angle: 40-player "Smash battle royale," an idea so wild "we might not actually ship it"

Odyssey Interactive, the studio behind the cult disc hockey game Omega Strikers, has announced a new project called Byte Breakers, which is described as a battle royale take on Super Smash Bros.

Late last year, Odyssey said it was pivoting away from Omega Strikers to begin work on "new games" set in the same universe, and now it's revealed the first prototype of several that are in consideration. Byte Breakers is a battle royale game with 40-player lobbies in which two-player teams drop into a city with an encroaching "glitch zone" and battle it out to be the last team standing.

"We'll all probably be calling this something like a Smash battle royale, and let's be real, polish level right now looks a little ass," said Odyssey co-founder Dax Andrus.

Andrus says Byte Breakers takes aspects of multi-team battle royales, including a big open map and strategic decision making, and mashes them together with "the solid fundamentals from Smash" to make something truly original.

"We've been trying to find a blend of genres that you haven't seen before, because as a studio, we'd rather try something crazy and fail than just make a game that you feel like you've already played," said co-founder Richard Henkel.

In the brief gameplay footage shown in the announcement, you can see a variety of Omega Strikers characters darting around a massive map with more than a dozen platforms for players to duke it out. The movement seems a little faster paced, but in general the combat looks very Smash Bros.-esque indeed. It even looks like your health is determined by a percentage that increases as you take damage, making it easier for enemies to knock you off the stage.

Byte Breakers is doing a playtest starting this Friday on Steam, and the response to that is what will decide whether Odyssey ultimately ships the game. Marketing director Ryan Rigney said on Twitter that "this isn't rhetoric—we're serious," adding, "If you love it, we double down. If not, we icebox it."

As a longtime Smash Bros. player and a very, very occasional battle royale player (I played Fortnite for like a year when it came out), I'm intrigued by this. Omega Strikers has been generally well-received and the concept is genuinely novel. That said, it'll be a real test for the indie developer to invoke the undisputed king of platform fighters as an inspiration and try to do it justice. I think my biggest concern is that it'll just make me want to go play Smash Bros., but I'll reserve judgment for now.

In the meantime, here are the best fighting games you can play today.