I keep coming back to the same three games whenever my squad is online and we are trying to decide what to play, and honestly I have tried to replace all three of them at different points because newer options keep launching and they all promise better graphics or faster gameplay or whatever the marketing angle is that season. None of them stick. We always end up back on PUBG or Apex or Tarkov because these three do squad play in ways that nobody else has figured out yet, and at this point I do not think it is a coincidence that they have all been around for years and still have massive player bases.
PUBG Still Hits Different in a Four-Stack
People keep saying PUBG is dead or dying and they have been saying that since like 2019 and somehow it still has millions of players and the competitive scene is still running. The game is slower than Apex or Fortnite and everyone brings that up like it is some kind of flaw, but that slower pace is literally the entire reason squad play works so well in PUBG. You actually have time to set up positions. You can plan a rotation. You can talk through whether to push a compound or hold the edge and wait for the circle to do the work for you. In Apex or Fortnite those conversations happen in about two seconds because someone is already getting shot at. In PUBG you get five minutes of tense silence where nothing happens and then everything happens at once and whether you survive depends on what your squad did during those five quiet minutes.
The squads that win consistently in PUBG are almost never the ones with the best aim, and this is something that took me way too long to figure out. It is always the squads that stop dying to stupid stuff. Getting caught in the open during a rotation because nobody checked the zone timer. Losing a 4v2 because two people rushed the revive at the same time and left nobody shooting back. Dropping in a hot zone with a full squad and then realising nobody found anything better than a shotgun and a level one vest.
Stuff that actually changed how my squad plays:
- Vehicles are not suicide, they are strategy. Mid-to-late game, driving across an open field and bailing behind hard cover gains you position that squads on foot cannot contest. We designate one driver now and everyone dismounts on a callout. Sounds basic but it took us months to actually commit to it.
- Share meds constantly. If one person is carrying six first aids and someone else has zero you are weaker as a squad than if everyone has two. We started calling out our med count after every fight and it immediately made a difference.
- Edge of the circle, always. We used to fight for center positioning and it felt strategic at the time but center squads get pushed from literally every direction. Edge squads only have to watch the front and can rotate with the closing zone behind them.
- When somebody gets knocked, one person revives and two keep shooting. Every single squad wipe that starts with “I was trying to get him up” was preventable.
Ranked is where PUBG squad play actually opens up because casual lobbies are full of people running around like it is a deathmatch. In ranked, other teams are holding positions and playing rotations and the game starts feeling like an actual tactical experience. If your squad has been stuck at the same rank for a while and cannot figure out what is going wrong, Skycoach does squad coaching where a higher-ranked player reviews your actual gameplay and tells you exactly which positioning habits are getting you killed. I was skeptical about coaching for a battle royale game but the rotation mistakes they pointed out were things we genuinely did not see ourselves.
Apex Is Trios and the Team Comp Genuinely Matters
One thing that bothers me about most Apex guides online is they recommend legend picks as if you are playing solo queue. But if you are running a consistent trio and you are all picking whoever you individually want instead of building a comp, you are handicapping yourselves in ways that are really hard to see until you switch to an actual coordinated team and suddenly fights that used to feel impossible become winnable.
Apex runs three-player squads. That smaller team size compared to PUBG or Tarkov means there is absolutely no room to carry a weak link. If one person in a four-stack has an off night you can still win fights. In trios every player has to contribute or the math just falls apart in any even engagement.
The trio comp my squad settled on after cycling through basically everything:
- Bloodhound for recon. The tactical scan goes through walls and covers a wide area and in a game where third-partying is the number one cause of death, knowing where the next squad is before they push you is worth more than any damage ability in the game. The ultimate speeds up movement and highlights enemies in red which makes committed pushes terrifying for whoever is on the receiving end.
- Lifeline for sustain. The D.O.C. drone heals passively between fights so your squad is not burning through med kits every thirty seconds. Lifeline can pick up downed teammates while still being free to shoot back which is genuinely broken in the middle of a fight when the enemy team thinks they have a numbers advantage and then suddenly the person they knocked is back up. The Care Package ultimate drops upgraded gear and in early game when everyone’s loot is random that can completely swing the power balance.
- Bangalore for aggression and escape. Smoke covers revives, covers repositioning, and covers the “oh no we need to get out of here immediately” moments that happen in every single game. Rolling Thunder forces people off high ground and out of cover which is exactly what you need in late circles when some team is camping a building and refuses to move.
You can swap Gibraltar for Bangalore if your squad wants to play slow and defensive behind the dome. You can swap Seer for Bloodhound if you prefer the heartbeat sensor tracking style over the wide scan. But the core idea is the same — you need one recon, one support, and one aggressive utility legend. Three damage legends with no healer and no recon is how most random squads play and it is also why most random squads get third-partied and die.
Getting through Platinum and into Diamond ranked in Apex is where most trios hit a wall because the lobbies start punishing poor team fight coordination hard. If your individual mechanics are solid but your trio keeps losing 3v3s because you push at different times or use abilities on different targets, that coordination gap is exactly what Skycoach coaches work on. Mechanical skill you can grind yourself but team timing is hard to improve without someone outside the squad watching it and calling out where it breaks down.
Escape from Tarkov Is Not Really Comparable to the Other Two but It Belongs on This List
Tarkov should probably not be discussed in the same article as PUBG and Apex because it is genuinely a different genre at this point, but every time someone asks me what the best squad game is I end up talking about it anyway because nothing else creates the same feeling.
There is no respawning. There is no circle closing. You load into a raid with whatever equipment you chose to bring — your gun, your armor, your ammo, your meds, your backpack — and if you die, all of it is gone. Not temporarily, not until next round. Gone. Another player loots it off your body and takes it home. Your character keeps their skills and level progression but every physical item walks out the door with whoever killed you.
That permanent loss changes how squad play feels in a way I genuinely cannot overstate. When your four-man group decides to push Dorms on Customs or go underground on Reserve, everybody in the squad is risking gear they either found on previous raids or bought with money they saved up. A bad call from the squad leader costs everyone hundreds of thousands of roubles in about thirty seconds and you feel that loss for multiple raids afterwards because now you are running cheaper kits trying to earn back what you lost.
Communication in Tarkov has to be more precise than any other game I have played because there are no HUD markers, no teammate outlines, no minimap, and friendly fire is always on. Saying “enemy on the left” without specifying which left from which landmark means your teammate might spin and shoot you. Our squad spent weeks developing callout systems for every map we play because the official maps do not label most of the places people actually fight over and if you are using different names for the same spot things go wrong fast.
And then there is the loot economy which no other squad game has at all. If your team finds a Labs key card that is a shared decision about when to use it because Labs is the most dangerous and most rewarding map in the game and going in unprepared is just setting money on fire. Squads that pool resources and coordinate loadouts before raids survive longer than groups where everyone builds independently and crosses their fingers.
The learning curve is steep enough that most people who try Tarkov solo quit within a few weeks. Bullet penetration values against specific armor classes, ricochet chances, which ammo types are actually worth buying versus which ones look expensive but perform badly — the knowledge floor is incredibly high. For a full squad getting into Tarkov together, running a few coaching sessions through Skycoach can genuinely save weeks of the miserable early phase where everyone is dying to scavs because they loaded the wrong ammunition and did not understand why their shots were not doing anything.
