Supervive's new hunter takes League of Legends' scariest mechanic, and makes it even scarier

I’m an enchanter support main in League of Legends. I like buffing my ADC’s attack damage as Nami, or speeding allies up as Janna; despite the role’s squishiness, shielding and healing is where I thrive. But then you put me up against a Blitzcrank, or a Nautilus, and it all falls apart. One perfectly timed hook can yank me under tower, chunking my HP and, oftentimes, killing me entirely. It’s an ability I like to use against others, but hate to be on the receiving end of, and having seen Supervive‘s take on it with new hunter, Kingpin, I’m genuinely terrified.

I’m introduced to Kingpin by Supervive technical designer Kyle Leach, who worked on both the character and the multiplayer game‘s larger map. “He’s the hook guy,” he tells me in our exclusive reveal interview. “His internal name on all of our assets is ‘hook guy.’” I feel a cold sweat coming on.

As we see in the trailer below, Kingpin’s kit does, indeed, rely on his hook. We see him spike an unfortune Brall into the abyss, and pull various enemies in towards him using his bright pink extending arm. “He’s a bad guy,” Leach tells me with a smile. “He embodies this ferocious brutality that’s very fun and lets you embrace the chaos of this free for all fight.”

Kingpin was one of the first heroes Theorycraft designed, and while the team’s combat philosophy has changed over the years, the central hook mechanic has remained at his core. “How can we make a hook character that’s self sufficient, fun to play, and terrifying?” Leach muses. “Our combat model requires every character to be able to fight for themselves; you’re going to find yourself in a situation where the rest of your team is far away or dead, and you’re the last one there. You have to have hope that you can save your team and win the game.

“He does have the typical MOBA support output of a hook, but his kit also has a ton of self sufficiency and more bruiser output – and occasionally assassin output – than you would expect of a hook character.”

The talk turns to League of Legends, which Leach worked on before his Theorycraft adventures. Expressing my passionate hatred for Blitzcrank, I ask Leach how you go about balancing hook-based characters – especially in a fast-paced environment where being able to hold your own is key.

“I think about Blitzcrank a lot,” Leach tells me (honestly, same; he haunts my dreams.) “Blitzcrank has this very clear self-combo: you get the hook and you can always hit your knock up; you can even optimize it and get an attack in between. That works in League because Blitzcrank isn’t going to 100 to zero you.”

Kingpin, by contrast, “does have the tools to get a kill when he gets on top of someone. You can land the hook, but if your mind stops at landing the hook, the [enemy’s] just going to walk away and be fine, because you have tools to attack and damage them, but you don’t have a way to guaranteed CC [crowd control] them in place.

“There’s a half-second warmup between pulling someone in with your hook and hitting them with your stun” he continues. “But during that half-second, the target can move freely [but can’t dash]. So we ground the character and let them walk around in front of you, but we also restrict your turn rate while you’re doing the headbutt.

“The result of that is a 50/50; Kingpin needs to make a guess as to which way the target will move, and the target needs to think about which way the Kingpin player is going to guess and try and move the opposite way. If Kingpin hits his stun, he has a lot of tools to finish the kill but it’s not 100%.”

What will 100% kill you, however, is Kingpin’s unique spike ability. While hitting a character when they’re gliding will plunge them into the abyss, as you see in the trailer above, if you headbutt and stun a character as Kingpin mid-air, he’ll send you spiralling into the depths, effectively spiking them.

Leach is partly responsible for this mechanic, as it evolved from one of his original plays. “I remember pulling off this combo with Kingpin where I jumped off of the grind rail because I saw someone was over a gap. I jumped over the gap, dashed at the person, and used my headbutt – I felt like a wrestler jumping off the top rope and elbow dropping on the person.”

At the time, however, Kingpin’s stun was simply a rectangular box, meaning the character simply dropped. “I thought about it a lot and I was like, we could lean into this – it already looks physical, he’s slamming his arm down.” From here, the team added a much more impressive slam animation, really giving you that physical feel.

Supervive Kingpin abilities

If all of this sounds right up your alley, we’ve got a full rundown of Kingpin’s abilities below:

• Passive: Feed the Beast – Gain permanent health on killing enemies
• LMB: Scattergun – Fire a short-ranged burst of bullets
• RMB: Abyssal Grasp – Throw out an massively extended, ethereal arm that can travel through walls and grabs the first target it hits
• LSHIFT: Brute Dash – Dash a short distance
• Q: Primal Slam – Slam a fist in front of Kingpin, dealing damage, stunning enemies, and slamming them downward
• R: Slugwave – After a brief charge-up, fire a double-barrel blast of energy at enemies

While we’ll need to wait for the next Supervive playtest to take Kingpin out for a spin, I can honestly say I can’t wait, even if he does terrify me. To our knowledge, there’s no playtest in the works at the moment, but Theorycraft has confirmed that the Supervive open beta is set for “late 2024.” Be sure to check back here, though; we’ll keep you updated.

In the meantime, however, we have a list of the best battle royale games if squading up and outrunning the ring gets your heart pumping. Alternatively, we have a list of all the upcoming PC games for 2024 and beyond if you’re looking for something completely new.