Medic tries Apex Legends
Apex Legends is a 60-player Battle Royale game published by EA. That sentence is normally enough to send me screaming and running away in the other direction. A game related to EA? Some sort of Battle Royale game? One that involves slightly more realistic shooting? None of those things are options I like in my video games. I’ve always been the sort who prefers more cartoony stuff, but here I am, giving Apex a try.
Funnily enough, Apex Legends is actually a game I have been pestered about for ages. Despite all the aforementioned problems that would normally put me off the game. But after I finally got around to downloading the game, I found myself chatting with my sister as she ran me through the basics in the training area and flicked friendly fire on and off so she could shoot her boyfriend.
After a while of messing around, we decided to play a game.
Only to immediately be killed the second we landed. By two teams. Despite landing in a normally quiet area.
Not a good start. And frankly that is the main reason why I don’t like Battle Royale games. I might as well not have even bothered queuing up.
The next two games went a bit better, but I immediately noticed a problem. I can’t shoot for shit and I don’t know the game well enough to get properly switch weapons and actually fight or get around terrain. Of course, the latter is a typical newbie problem. But the former means that there’s literally zero chance of me actually winning a game ever. I mean, how CAN I win if I can’t shoot straight. This ties into my biggest problem by far when it comes to battle royales: you literally never win a game. You just die over and over again and there’s no sense of progress what so ever.
But enough of my hatred of battle royales, what about Apex itself?
Well, it’s alright.
I honestly don’t have much to say about Apex that hasn’t already been said by aabicus. The respawn mechanic is cool. I think the mobility is pretty neat. The guns look cool. Most of the skins are pretty snazzy. And you can get free lootboxes over time.
The forced teamwork works pretty well too. You have no choice but to work with your two other team mates if you want victory, and the ping system is intuitive enough to allow communication without voice or text chat.
My biggest complaint I think is that the base characters are actually pretty boring, apart from Pathfinder and maybe Wraith. Pathfinder and Wraith have pure mobility powers, and Pathfinder’s next-ring passive thing is genuinely nice. But no one’s abilities seem as useful as the cool shit the DLC/paid for characters have.
The daily challenges thing is pretty neat, and I’m glad there is a free battle pass as well as a premium one. That being said, literally my first daily challenge was to get knock-downs as Caustic, which is a premium-only character that a brand new player can’t obtain. There’s also the issue of getting things like voice lines as lootbox rewards. No one hears them and they basically waste what could have been a cool reward, like a weapon skin.
So what do I think?
Like I said, it’s alright. Definitely playable, and the respawn and teamwork mechanics do make Apex Legends stand out. But it’s still a battle royale game, which I’m not a fan of, and I worry that Apex Legends will get in the way of any future Titanfall game. It’s still definitely playable though.
Will I play Apex with the intention of getting good at it? No. Frankly I am not a fan of dying and being a waste of space all the time. Will I play it as a bit of fun with friends? Sure.