Nubs! Arena

Written by Jason Dailey on 5/20/2025 for PC  

It’s tough for a competitive multiplayer game to stand out in a world where just a few juggernauts dominate nearly the entire space. But that cannot (and should not) discourage developers from trying to capture their niche from Call of Duty, Fortnite, and the rest. Nubs! Arena took an unconventional approach by being totally free for its first 24 hours on the market. After all, it only takes one or two viral social media clips to catch fire nowadays.

So, did it work? Is the game good? Well, the short answer is that it’s sporadically good, though the marketing trick of offering it for free has established a bit of a playerbase to grow with – if they’ll stick around.

Nubs! Arena is a PvP multiplayer arena battler with some battle royale tendencies and cute art direction. Sporting a top-down perspective and colorful “Nubs,” you and three other competitors battle it out to capture the most stars. On death, players become a star floating around the map – survive long enough without being captured and you’ll respawn, but getting captured by another player means your done, in addition to being another star on their belt. At the end of a match, the player with the most stars wins. Each match is comprised of five rounds that alternate between 2v2 team fights, or a free-for-all Last Nub Standing mode, which is a little confusing at first with the lack of a tutorial.

Matches are fast and frenetic as you race around the arena looting chests for better weapons and items. Everyone starts with a basic sword and bow for both melee and ranged attacks, with better versions available around the board. So instead of shooting plain arrows, you can shoot explosive fireballs with an upgraded ranged weapon, for instance. Each arena is also laden with traps and throwable barrels that will explode, freeze, or poison your foes. Additionally, you can grab limited-use items like spinning blades that can be used to box an opponent in.

For the first couple of days, there was a bit of a camping problem but that’s since been addressed, with a battle royale-esque ring-of-death narrowing the arena as time goes on. While structured a bit like a battle royale, it handles like a twin-stick hack-and-slash, with movement controlled by the left stick, aiming by the right, and attacks bound to the left and right triggers on Steam Deck.

It feels great to play on Deck without any tweaks necessary, but even days after launch, Nubs has serious performance problems, including constant stuttering and prolonged lag during gameplay. It’s been updated several times already, with performance improving mildly, though still in an unacceptable state. It’s a problem that doesn’t seem exclusive to Steam Deck either, based on Steam reviews.

I dig the look and feel of Nubs’ combat, but there’s a big caveat – my enjoyment has been directly linked to the randomness of passive abilities that you acquire between rounds. Whether I get destroyed or do the destroying appears to hinge directly on the RNG of which passives I get offered over the course of a match.

At first, I thought I just wasn’t very good at the game, until my luck turned during a match where my passive abilities stacked up in a way that was overpowered. I received one that gave me 50 extra starting health, another that healed me for 50% of all melee damage I dealt, and another that poisoned enemies with each of my melee attacks. I absolutely owned that match; it wasn’t even close. All of which is to say there needs to be some tuning done to passives, not necessarily the abilities themselves, but certainly the backend computations spitting them out between rounds. Nubs badly needs a balancing pass.

Ultimately, Nubs does have potential, I just don’t know if it can break through. I enjoy its combat and chaos, but I don’t have the stomach for poor performance or balancing issues in my competitive multiplayer games. The development team had the right idea offering the game for free during its first 24 hours of life, so there is at least somewhat of a playerbase to hopefully keep it going while they sort things out a bit.

With that said, its normal retail price is only $7.99 and is still currently on sale for less than a fiver. I can assure you that I have one hundred thousand percent spent $5 on a whole lot worse than Nubs! Arena.