HomeGuidesSplitgate
Splitgate tips and tricks: a beginner’s guideUse these practical Splitgate tips to win countless matches
Use these practical Splitgate tips to win countless matches
Are you in need of some practical Splitgate tips and tricks?Often described as “Halo meets Portal”,Splitgatehas exploded onto the scene out of the blue after 2 years of Early Access, and a great many players are only now discovering that it’s about as brain-meltingly complex as it sounds.
In this beginner’s guide to Splitgate, I’ll walk you through some top tips and tricks that have helped me dominate any map and mode in the game, covering everything through portal usage to weapon types and map knowledge.
Splitgate (2021): Announce TrailerWatch on YouTube
Splitgate (2021): Announce Trailer
Splitgate tips and tricks
Splitgate is an incredibly chaotic arenaFPS game. It feels like a homage to those old-school shooters like Halo multiplayer andQuake, until you realise that there are portals and jetpacks which provide an enormous amount of complexity and depth to every match and every fight.
If you’re struggling to get started with Splitgate, let the following tips guide you to start earning kills and outsmarting your opponents - which is where the true splendour of Splitgate lies.
Use portals to traverse the map
In Splitgate, you can shoot a portal at any blue wall, ceiling, or floor. Most players know this, but most new players don’t take full advantage of it, and run ploddingly towards their destination instead of portalling to get there in an instant. Not only is it faster, but it’s much harder for enemies to keep track of your whereabouts, which gives you a massive advantage. If you find yourself running a lot, you should put more effort into using portals for map traversal.
Shoot through portals
Pay attention to your crosshair
No matter your crosshair type (and you can change your crosshair type for every weapon in Splitgate’s UI settings), it will turn a different colour when you are hovering over an enemy. This is true even when looking through an opaque enemy portal. This offers some counterplay to the previous point: if you hover over a portal and your crosshair changes colour, an enemy is there and if you shoot right now you’ll hit them.
Use portals to prevent enemy portal placements
You can’t place a portal where another player’s portal already is placed. Instead you have to either kill the player, wait for them to portal elsewhere, or use an EMP Grenade on the portal to destroy it.
But even the EMP, which is the most practical method, isn’t always viable. That makes it a powerful technique to use your portals to block up a wall where an enemy might want to portal, preventing them from doing so. It’s a great defensive trick that every Splitgate player should know.
Learn to expect the enemy portal placement
Many new players might treat Splitgate as an ordinary shooter and ignore portals, but more experienced players will always be looking for the opportunity to portal behind or above you and shoot you from an unexpected angle. As your map knowledge grows (more on how to do this later), you should focus on the blue portal-able areas within sight of you, and expect an enemy to appear from those angles at any moment.
On certain maps this is even more of an issue. Stadium is a small map where each team can view and portal into the other team’s spawn area from the very start, so it’s an important thing to learn to expect.
Triple portals: an advanced portal technique
For our final portal-specific tip, we’re going a little bit more advanced. Triple portals are a technique taken from Portal itself, and they’re essential for players who really want to play competitively. Here’s how it works:
This technique is the single fastest way to move around in Splitgate, and in many cases it allows you to cross to the other side of the map in an instant. It relies heavily on map knowledge, of course, but as you get better and better at Triple Portalling, you can use it to great effect in fights. You can even chain together multiple Triple Portals with enough practice, side-stepping back and forth through portals to blink from point to point across even the largest maps.
Switch weapons quickly in fights
You can switch weapons extremely quickly in Splitgate, because the animations for lowering and raising your weapons are so fast. This means it’s often better to fire once with a punchy weapon like a Carbine, and then switch to your Assault Rifle to continue shooting.
It’s particularly powerful when playing the Team Shotty Snipers game mode (where every player has a Sniper Rifle and a Shotgun), and a quick example is displayed in the short video below. Shoot with a Sniper Rifle for 65+ damage, then switch to a Shotgun and finish them off. This is much faster than waiting for either of these slow-firing weapons to be ready to fire again.
Play Race and Custom Games to improve your map knowledge
Map knowledge in Splitgate is unbelievably important - more important than in almost any other game I can think of. You need to learn the different portal spots on each map, and the different sightlines and angles from which you can shoot unexpected portals and move about with the highest possible efficiency.
I’ve found a great, pressure-free way to explore and learn each map is to play either the Race training mode for that map, or to create a private custom game where you can move about the map for as long as you like. If you want you can populate those custom games with bots to practice against, but I’d honestly spend some time Triple-Portalling from point to point to point on any new map until you understand its layout and portal possibilities better.
Prioritise the weapon pickups
Many of Splitgate’s modes start its players off with a certain loadout of weapons, but offer other weapons as drops at certain spawn points across each map. Some of these weapons are awesomely powerful, such as the Railgun, the BFB, and the Rocket Launcher; and it’s very important for your team to gain control of these weapons before the enemy team does. So at the beginning of a game, you should work with your team to prioritise taking the strongest weapons as quickly as possible.
Learn from your fellow players
Understand the quirks of all the different weapons
Obviously certain weapons will feel better and more familiar to you than others, but it’s well worth learning the ins and outs and strengths and weaknesses of each one regardless. Here are just a handful of little-known quirks about certain Splitgate weapons:
Spend some time in custom games or the practice range and learn the feel, fire rate, and range of all the different weapons. It’s well worth the time spent.
Hopefully these Splitgate tips have given you the ammunition you need to start stepping up your game and outplaying your opponents. If you’re after more Splitgate content, why not read a bit about how the gameexploded in popularity during its beta?
