Alternates

Alternates is a team-based first-person shooter running on Polygon and Telos, and its most notable design choice has little to do with either chain: sign-in is a Google account and purchases go through an ordinary credit or debit card. There is no seed phrase to store and no wallet to fund before a first match, which puts it in the small group of blockchain shooters reachable with no crypto onboarding at all.

The gameplay itself is deliberately conventional. Search and Destroy is the centerpiece — round-based attack and defend, no respawns to rescue a bad push — so matches turn on squad coordination, timing and map control rather than anything on-chain. Factions supply narrative framing and team identity, while NFTs cover characters and cosmetics alongside an inventory layer for managing and trading them.

That conventionality is also the weakness. A familiar tactical shooter competes directly with free, enormous, heavily populated rivals, and rewards tied to competitive performance concentrate value among players who already win. Round-based modes punish thin matchmaking harder than most, so population matters more here than token design.

Worth investigating if you want a straightforward shooter with asset ownership attached quietly; less so if you came for novel economic mechanics.