
Give Me 5 on Fortnite
Before you read, if you haven’t watched the gameplay trailer, i’ve included the link for you right here:
For those of you that are new to the party, Fortnite is an online, co-op, zombie survival game that resembles Plants vs. Zombies and plays as if Minecraft and Left 4 Dead had a baby. I know that’s a lot to take in all at once, so let me explain.
The Facts:
- Publisher: Epic Games
- Developers: Epic Games and People Can Fly
- Solo and Co-op supported (up to 4 people)
- No PVP mode
- Currently in early access and went live publicly on July 25, 2017
- Early access will run you $40-$150 depending on how much gear you want to start off with
- You CAN upgrade in game which means if your buddy buys a more expensive pack, and you want what they got, you just pay the difference
- It will eventually be Free-to-Play when the full version releases in 2018
- The game is available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One, PC and Mac (PC and Mac versions play on the same servers, aka cross-platform)
The Research
Fortnite is a zombie survival game where you play through a campaign made up of individual missions that have one of a select few objectives. You collect materials, craft weapons and ultimately defend your home base from hordes of zombies similiar to a wave mode in pretty much any zombie game to date.
You can play through entirely solo or with up to three friends. Either way it’s the same game, but Fortnite definitely caters to groups. In fact, they even state that they want you to team up with other people in order to get more experience! If the game scales up the difficulty when multiple people join a game though, it definitely isn’t noticeable. In other words, play this with friends. Just do it. And if you don’t have friends, play with the community since it does have matchmaking that seems to work well all around.
As far as early access goes, there have been plenty of small bugs with animations, loading sequences and the like, but they’ve been minimal for most (Not to mention there has already been a decent sized update to resolve a vast number of these problems). When it comes to network issues however, this game is no unicorn. It still has its fair share of connectivity problems and of course it always seems to be at the worst possible times (like when you’re about to finish a 20 minute long mission). If we’re being fair though, there are full versions of games out right now that have plenty of their own problems with network connectivity. That being said, the game is by no means unplayable. It should just be noted that progress in a mission is not saved if your game crashed and you can’t get back in once your game has restarted.
The gameplay itself is pretty entertaining with a plethora of different weapons and skills to build. As you play through the campaign, skills come from experience and leveling up, while weapons are gained from breaking objects in game, or built from schematics. You gain schematics literally by just playing the game, so for the most part it all works well together. The one really glaring area of opportunity is in the crafting system. You can only hold so many items in your backpack, but your backpack holds all of your crafting materials period. You would think that this is a good idea, up until you find yourself hoarding planks and nuts to the point where you have to decide on crafting materials or that brand new rare sword you just found that may or may not be weaker than the other three that you already have… For those of us that can’t help but save items for when we probably will not need them later in the game, this is a problem. Since your weapons have durability anyways, the simplest fix would seemingly be to make them have less durability. However, the other problem could just be that I use a Ninja hero which benefits from sword weapons and thus I never craft ammunition. What I know for sure is that the crafting and building appear a little unbalanced at the moment, but it is very likely that we will see this change with feedback over the next year.
The Review
All-in-all, it’s a well built game. Gameplay — great. Graphics — good. Content — good. Servers — meh. I’m not upset that I spent $40 on it. It’s hard for me to recommend that you buy the early access version if you don’t like wave based games, but even if you don’t like that style, there are many parts that still make it worth the money.
I will say though, Epic has definitely taken an interesting approach to crowdfunding in charging people for a free-to-play game. Knowing that this will eventually run off of a free-to-play, pay-to-win monetization style has me a little nervous. Maybe it is just a shift in mentality, but that doesn’t make me feel any less uneasy. My conclusion is that we are just supporting the early production of Epic and People Can Fly by investing in this game which should cause it to be an even better and more balanced game in the end.
Epic Games, you get a thumbs up 👍
