After a couple dozen hours spent defending Fortnite’s charming, cartoony world from its swirling, monster-filled purple storms, it’s easy to draw comparisons between the chaos of those storms and Epic’s action-focused, base-building, horde-survival game. Its genuinely fun spurts of action and smart systems swirl around with its convoluted , drip-feed progression systems in the same soupy catch-all cloud. Fortnite feels like an effort to do a little bit of everything, and keep you doing it for a long, long time, and only partially succeeds.
While still in early access, Fortnite is in an admirable and constant state of construction, with new modes and content updates.
Though some small quality of life mechanics are missing from Fortnite’s version of this game mode, like the exclusion of vehicles to cover long distances relatively quickly, or a system for easily sorting through a lot of loot in a small space. But this much more arcadey take feels less intimidating thanks to the lighthearted tone and arcade-y action. It seems like there’s still quite a ways to go before this mode really finds its distinct identity on the strengths of Fortnite’s fun features.
The lion’s share of Fortnite is the PVE Save the World mode, pitting you against a storm that basically wiped out the world, leaving only hordes of zombie-like Husks to deal with. The crux of that experience boils down to two parts, the third-person action gameplay where your hero pillages a neighborhood, harvesting wood, stone, and steel and scavenging ammunition and items from literally everything around you. In these 20–30 minutes missions, Fortnite is great, carefree fun, running around a giant destructible sandbox, smashing and building and looting and slaying.
Though there are several different types of missions, they all boil down to one of two formats that, while initially fun, quickly become routine and generally run five to ten minutes longer than they probably need to. Missions like Ride the Lightning, Fight the Storm, and Repair the Shelter task you with finding a point, building a base around it, and defending against the encroaching storm of monsters. On the other hand, roaming missions like Rescue the Survivors and Destroy the Encampments require you to sprint around the map completing your objectives in the allotted time. not interested the arch of saving the world.. well never fear, Epic has got your back (as long as you build some cover)
Enter Battle Royale
Stiff arming its way through the crowded battle royale genre, Fortnite Battle Royale sets itself apart by trading the traditional, bland military simulation vibe with vivid colors and an outstanding, freeform building system that’s unlike anything else in competitive multiplayer games. As its name suggests, Fortnite Battle Royale fits so neatly into the battle royale genre that blew up last year that the basic description sounds as standard as you can get: Up to 100 players are dropped onto a large but constantly shrinking map with the goal of gathering weapons and gear to become the last person or team left standing. But if you look just a little closer, it can’t be mistaken for any other game because the vehicle you’re skydiving out of is, inexplicably, a flying party bus — a nice change of pace from a drab military plane — and the place you land is a giant, beautifully colorful island, instead of a realistic landscape, surrounded by a violent storm.
Thankfully, unlike other battle royale games, like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, where an unlucky circle could leave getting out of the encroaching circle almost impossible, Fortnite’s map is at least small enough (relative to PUBG’s) that even if you have to run across the entire island to get to the safety of the randomly centered eye of the storm you run very little risk of being killed by the collapsing border.
A supply Drop is anyone’s luck gambled when everyone rushes to it
On the island are several large and totally unique cities, each with their own style of structures — a quaint suburb of houses, a giant office district filled with skyscrapers, or a retail area with an outdoor mall. Each city is full of vibrant colors, and the map as a whole has hundreds of buildings with randomly spawning loot in the form of guns, explosives, and healing items.
Wait, Which Fortnite Is This? Developed by Epic Games, Fortnite was originally conceived as a third-person, co-op, survival game where teams of players could mine resources and build structures to hold off hordes of undead enemies. That version, now a standalone game called Fortnite Save the World, still exists, but it’s not great. But as the battle royale genre started to gain popularity early in 2017, Epic adapted its survival game’s basic systems into something new: Fortnite Battle Royale, a separate, free-to-play game that feels like the perfect home for Save the World’s wayward mechanics.
Fortnite Battle Royale’s inventory management is, thankfully, simple by design. You get just five slots, so you’re forced to balance your arsenal of guns with your need for healing or explosives to deal with enemy structures. It’s a neat limiting factor that forced me to keep a mental shopping list of exactly what I was on the lookout for as I ran across the island, and to resist the urge to pick up anything else. With such specific needs in mind, every chest came with the thrill of hoping it would reveal the weapons I wanted most. Fortnite gives you plenty of ways to mix and match weapons, so even if that chest doesn’t come up with the exact item you want, you’ll never feel powerless in a fight.
Once you do find the weapons you’re looking for, most fights in Fortnite go about the same way: You start with one shot from a slow-firing heavy weapon like a sniper rifle or pump shotgun in hopes of ending the fight before it really started, then (if needed) switch over to a faster assault rifle or tactical shotgun to carry out the rest of the battle. While it’s far from the only way to play, this combination seems to be the preferred method for almost every player and provides the foundation of almost every fight in Fortnite.
It’s a lightning-fast system where fights can end in the blink of an eye with just one slight miss. This makes for a stark contrast from other battle royale games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which is filled with long, tense standoffs where sustained accuracy often matters more than a single well placed shot. It’s a chaotic and fun system that makes fights a little more complicated than simply aiming at your opponent and firing, but after a few hours with Fortnite I started to get the shoot-and-switch rhythm down and fights started to become almost automatic.
It’s the stuff around the shooting that helps Fortnite differentiate itself from every other battle royale game and shows off what truly makes it special: The building.
The Building
Carrying over the building system from Save the World is a brilliant choice that sets Battle Royale apart not just from other battle royale games, but most competitive multiplayer games in general. Just about everything that isn’t the ground can be mined for wood, stone, or steel, which can be used to create walls, stairs, and floors anywhere on the map (so long as some part of the structure touches the ground). It’s a massive system with so many possibilities that, at first blush, it can be daunting to try to figure out how to build the massive structures that others around you have created. But that’s one of the best things about Fortnite: It always keeps things simple.
With just three primary tiles — floors, walls, and stairs — the building toolset may seem limited, but it’s got everything you really need. Whether it was building a staircase up to that hard-to-reach loot chest or quickly laying down an impromptu piece of cover to protect from an attacking enemy, I found I always had the tools I needed for the job at hand, and I could swap to the piece I needed without missing a beat. In fact, that swapping is so easy that one of my favorite moves is placing one platform and jumping off of it, then switch to another type in mid-air and place it before I land. That trick allows you to scale vertical walls or go straight up a mountain. While this may sound like an impressive feat of dexterity, Fortnite makes it so simple that almost anyone can pull it off — and they do, making it one of the most common tricks to getting around the island.
The first time I really understood how Fortnite’s building and shooting played into one another came in the middle of a fight in Retail Row, one of the map’s many cities. Another player and I were sheepishly taking shots at one another from behind single walls we had built. After I ran out of ammo in my assault rifle, I was forced to turn to my shotgun — a weapon I had largely disregarded up until this point. With the few resources I had left, I built stairs over my opponent’s wall, jumped off, flipped around, and shotgunned him. Looking back, it was as routine a play as it gets, but it was an absolute revelation for me at the time. Suddenly, everything made sense, and I realized that Fortnite Battle Royale is more about building than it is about shooting.
While the little things you can use it for may seem obvious — like building stairs to get to the roof of a building, or making a wall to block an enemy’s shots — the system also gives you room to think outside the box. You could build around a downed teammate that you can’t help yet, or create a decoy fort to lure enemies into an ambush while you wait behind a tree. The system even provides some elegant solutions to getting caught outside the trademark random circles of the battle royale genre: If you find yourself on the wrong side of a lake or chasm, no problem — just make your own bridge to the other side.
Thanks to the building system’s simple but robust design, you can throw structures together in a way that suits your style. While some people love high towers that stretch into the sky, I like to keep things at a lower altitude, giving me more room to bounce between my platforms and the ground. One player I faced lured me into his elaborate fortress of hallways, with doors that led to nothing, all in hopes of forcing me toward his waiting shotgun at the end of the maze.
Finally
Mastering Fortnite Battle Royale’s many systems is worth every second of investment. Whether you go it alone or queue up with a squad, even if you’re the first to die or you actually manage to earn the Victory Royale, Fortnite’s zany style and unique blend of shooting and building almost never offers anything less than an outstanding time. It may not be the first battle royale game, and it certainly won’t be the last, but Fortnite sets itself apart from the crowd by giving you the freedom and tools to express your own personal playstyle.
Score
Thanks to the freedom of its outstanding building mechanic, Fortnite Battle Royale isn’t just a great battle royale game — it’s one of the best multiplayer games in recent history.
Download
While Save the World is not free, Fortnite: Battle Royale is completely free to download and play. However there some other aspects of the game you can pay money to unlock but these are all purely cosmetic and don’t actually impact your ability to play the game. First of all you can pay to buy V-Bucks. These can then be used in the in-game store to purchase new skins, axes, gliders etc.
Play for Free doesn’t always mean free, remember that!
You can purchase what is called a ‘Battle Pass’ which allows you unlock challenges and gain rewards, such as the aforementioned skins, axes etc. Fortnite: Battle Royale has seasons’ which last for around ten weeks. If you buy the ‘Battle Pass’ for that season — it’s pretty cheap — you then can take part in the weekly challenges and gain rewards. These challenges are just part of a normal game rather than any special mode, and include things such as ‘Eliminate opponents with explosive weapons’ etc. Again there is no need to buy Battle Pass but it is a bit of fun.
Download Fortnite: Battle Royale for Free directly from Epic Games
