Xiaomi's smartphone shooting game is PUBG, Battlefield and Counter-Strike in one

Watch us play the smartphone maker's own game

Reading Time:3 minutes

I had to slowly kill these one by one. (Picture: Xiaomi Gunfight)

Published: 11:15pm, 4 Sep 2018Updated: 8:38am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

When an early version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds took gamers by storm last year, among the Chinese companies to quickly roll out clones of the PC game for smartphones was Xiaomi.

Yeah, that Xiaomi. The one that makes smartphones, tablets and other hardware. They've long been accused of making hardware that is, to put it delicately, "inspired" by Apple. So it's probably fitting that this game is inspired by not one, but three major games.

In October 2017, the company jumped on the PUBG crazy by adding a battle royale mode to Xiaomi Gunfight, and it was a hit. It soared to the top of China’s iOS app store along with NetEase’s PUBG clones, and Xiaomi claimed that it drew more than one million daily active users within 11 days of release.

But Chinese players soon turned to Tencent after it released two official PUBG Mobile games in February. While NetEase has found success in overseas markets for Knives Out and Rules of Survival, Xiaomi Gunfight struggled to stay relevant.

Being a battle royale fan, however, I still wanted to play Xiaomi Gunfight. But I arrived too late to this party, because nobody's playing this mode anymore... which is probably why Xiaomi expanded with two new modes.

But we'll get to those later, because I wanted to start with battle royale.