Fortnite: Battle Royale Review

30 players remaining. Three Russian kids shouting Buddy: “Blue! Blue! Take the shield! They are shooting at the floor near the shield potion that has been dropped for Buddy. They are, evidently, much better at Fortnite Battle Royale than Buddy. Above the brow of the next hill was someone dressed as Harley Quinn building a vault. One of your squad members takes them out with a headshot from their fancy purple sniper rifle, pulling the other three foes out. The next 30 seconds are chaos jumping, reviving allies and screaming for revival itself. Somehow, when the dust settles, the surviving teammates. A colorful puddle of loot lies where your enemies fall.

20 players remaining. You are far from the safe zone and the storm is approaching at a speed that makes your back sticky. Your squad speaks alert Russian, running across the field towards Dusty Divot where you will have your base ready if you are on time. The sheer cliff face was pushed up with an impromptu ladder, created in the blink of an eye. 19 players remaining. 18. The ones with the fancy purple sniper rifles had seen something and, wordlessly, they took a shot. It misses the mark, and seconds later a bullet out of nowhere fell in one hit. More excited Russians shouted into headset microphones hundreds of miles away. Then: disaster. Two more friends are tricked by the same sniper. Unless you can see it now someone is sticking out from behind a tree on the horizon, and two of their friends are building a big wooden tower behind them.

The three of you crawl miserably out of sight, waiting for your remaining companions to play the hero and bring you all back to life. Or kill the enemy that brought you down. Something. Instead, they choose to jump aimlessly to and fro, start building walls and then think better. When you finally bleed out, there is someone playing an air guitar on your corpse. The remaining fourteen. This experience, and the many variations you will experience in one night play, has proven to be the most popular of all games in 2018. There is something about the unpredictability of it all, the constant capacity for this game. You are a hero, an underdog, a scheming fugitive, a determined pursuer, it was simply unbearable at the moment. The battle royale game is the new black. And while it might sound ridiculous to say this half a year ago when PUBG was more popular than oxygen, Fortnite is the reigning king of the genre now.

Is this really a better game than PUBG? Instead of H1Z1, the last standalone OG game? The question is interesting not only because the fight is so close, but because on a technical level the bar is quite low. Fortnite is still an Early Access game, and its two big rivals have just graduated to big school. All three had issues with cheating, with unreliable servers, and with glitches. It feels less of a problem here, but cheats are still present in Fortnite. Their presence is not as obvious as in PUBG. Many only work in Solos mode rather than hacking the game, although the spectator mode controls make the players pretty easy to identify and report to. It's an ongoing conversation, of course, but at the moment cheats don't spoil the fun - they're just a by-product of the wildly popular multiplayer game still in development. In contrast, the last wave of dominantly multiplayer games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: GO feels like it was carved out of solid granite and polished to a mirror shine. There's a wild western feel to the entire Battle Royale genre that hasn't been in Dota or CS since their origins as fan-made mods.

In some identifiable areas, Fortnite Battle Royale is the better war fighting game. Its building mechanics lend something of value to the formula, that much-needed extra level of interest when everyone's being so cautious in the last few minutes of the round. PUBG and H1Z1 are happy to let you hunker down in the bush and try as many mistakes out of your player model as you can, but Fornite gives you the potential to build the eponymous fortress, or throw trash at your opponent. Boss Key's 'Early Access' Excess offers Radical Heights running in different directions to avoid the tedious final war ending, shrinking the play zone to a tiny dot and lighting it so well that hiding is nearly impossible. In the end, the creativity of Fortnite Battle Royale in this regard prevails.

Buildings are just one of the component parts that go round and round and make Fortnite royale's battle operation engine, and among these, gunplay feel the most honed and reliable. The specifics are transparent: hit points fall out of the player you just picked up, and extra crosshair lines to indicate a direct hit. It's frustrating at first to be held quite far from the action by a third-person perspective with an all-assault rifle, but the result is faster combat. With a simplified shooting model, there's an urge to get stuck in, don't worry about crosshair size or wind direction. Two terrified people jumping up and down and pulling the trigger like they were in a Quake III tournament final: undeniably a good thing. There's also enough disparity between the rare weapon hierarchies to encourage more hunting or retrieving them from enemy corpses. Sniper rifles and rocket launchers are everyone's dream, and if you can pick up spike and bush traps along the way, you all win.

Consider a spike trap, actually. This time last year we made our own fun in PUBG by waiting behind closed doors or fishing doors with stuff. There's a lot to be said for MacGuyver about such shrewd tactics, but there's also a lot more to be said for laying the large panel of twisted nails on the other side of the doorway and the sign coaxing after pointless marks into your doom nest. It's emblematic of Fortnite's design philosophy, everything is made explicit, it's there to experiment with, and it all looks like it came out of a warped toy box. Mechanically there is a big payoff to it. At night, it's like fighting to the death in a children's cartoon.

Everyone out! Announce Battlebus as you fly over a world map featuring areas like Fun Parks and Haunted Hills. 100 cartoon heroes spill out from behind in search of matching objects in the game Crash Bandicoot. Say what you like about it: it's a game designed with at least half an eye designed for a junior audience. Anecdotally, a lot of the time when you leave the game to assign a squad to you instead of making friends with the humans you actually know, they are the kids of squadmates. That player base or Fortnite has a real problem with gasping helium. That's not the case as is often the case in PUBG. This is not Fortnite's strength or weakness. Anyone who may harbor the deeply misleading notion that children may not be as good at games will quickly find out what went wrong when one of them moonwalks over their corpse thirty seconds into a loop. It's odd, of course, if you're an adult, and that puts a greater responsibility on Epic to oversee its community interactions.

As in multiplayer games, the pinnacle of enjoyment can be found in getting people you know together and working as a squad. Unique to Fortnite is the added level of specialization within the squad: perhaps one of you is a construction expert who sees the world in terms of angles and resources, and can build a two-story house as fast as most people sneeze. Or people who actually care about mouse DPI - for which everyone just hands over their sniper rifles with no argument. The fact it can support continuous specialization like this is what makes Fortnite so tempting to come back, night after night. Everyone knows their craft, and at any moment they might be asked to pass it on and save the day. If there's any aspect of the game that still feels Early Access and there's the inclusion of seasons and limited-time events it gives a triple A sheen to the process. In each season, is a special challenge for those who care as much about XP and in-game currency as kill and win. They may ask you to find signs and dance alongside them, or get 10 shotgun shots in a certain area of ​​the map. Whether you pay much attention to challenges or not, their existence promotes map exploration for all because those who care about them will be attracted to certain areas to meet certain challenges.

Conclusion

It's easy to forget that this industry-destroying phenomenon is free to play. Therefore, an important argument should you play it? At the heart of every review is not asking is it worth it? But do you like fighting with 100 people in the somewhat unsettling world of cartoons? About a third of gamers overall today, the answer is, yes. Despite its junior style and mountains of cosmetic items, Fortnite's combat and construction fundamentals are strong enough to sustain weeks and months of play, and as it nears final release, it's only going to get stronger.