A Few Thoughts for Four Games of Fortnite

So I played Fortnite. I’ve actually had it installed for a while, for so long in fact that when I actually got around to actually playing it with actual people, I had to download a 6GB update. And… despite the huge fan base, despite the love it or hate it attitude people have, I… I kinda don’t really have much to say about it. I mean, I have things I could say about it, but none of it is particularly interesting and most of what I have to say has probably already been said before. I’m going to try and make a simpleton’s review anyway though.

But first things first, I really do love the art style. It’s bright, it’s colourful and it’s absurd. I’m not too fussed about the looks of the characters themselves but I genuinely enjoy the design of the landscapes and how cartoony everything looks and feels. In a stupid game of mass murder and stuff like that, I suppose it makes a change killing one another and fighting for our lives in a less realistic landscape. Sure, everything looks a bit naff on low settings, but that’s true of any game.

As for the guns and the shooting and the fighting and the building and all that? I don’t really have much of an opinion of it. I was too busy getting lost and trying not to die. Or, in the case of my first game, dying of fall damage.

Seriously, my first game, I was the 13th person left alive then killed myself with fall damage because I still don’t really get how the gliding parachute thing works. I didn’t fall that far, just enough to murder me. The whole time I had been backseat-driven by the rest of my squad. I did manage to get a single kill though. The last game I played, we did pretty well as a squad.

When it comes to gameplay though, I’m kinda not really bothered. My team mates though were hugely bothered by the building mechanics. “WHAT’S THE POINT OF COVER IF YOU CAN JUST BUILD A FORTRESS IN ONE CLICK?” That’s a fair point but there’s potentially some interesting uses here. You can protect yourself by building cover as you go along and give yourself a breather. I think the issue is less that you can build things and more that players can have so many building resources that there’s no reliable way of taking structures down. In the image above, two of the squad that killed me had built a massive fortress and it didn’t matter what you threw at it, they could just build more because they had so many resources.

The guns and stuff though? That’s all fine, I guess. I like the idea that you can either try and go for the best loot in the most dangerous areas or just scavenge around on the edges. Frankly, I prefer the tactic of starting far away and working inwards because that means everyone else going for the good loot will kill each other and you’ll find something nice along the way.

Epic Games did blatantly steal the respawn thing from Apex though. But it’s not like Apex invented respawns. If it’s a good mechanic, it shouldn’t be restricted to one single game.

The thing I do care about though is Save the World. I don’t really care at all for the battle royale mode, after all I was playing battle royales back in Minecraft Hunger Games. But Save the World looks fun. It also looks like the game that was originally meant to be created, before Epic Games shoved everything to one side and threw everything at the Battle Royale. Save the World looks genuinely interesting. A weird DIY zombie survival with various areas and tasks you have to go through, while also collecting resources. Almost like a bizarre mixture of Left 4 Dead, Minecraft and rainbow explosions.

But Save the World is not interesting enough for me to want to buy the early access for it. Honestly, Fortnite in general isn’t really that interesting for me to want to spend lots of time in it. I’ll derp around in it occasionally with friends, but that’s about it.