Apex Legends: The Kotaku Review
Apex Legends is a battle royale from Titanfall developer Respawn. It's loosely related to that series' world, but the connections aren't all that important. Twenty teams of three heroes, known as Legends, face off on a map. Each Legend has different abilities — healing drones, air strikes, shielding domes—that can give your team an advantage in battle.
The hero aspect of the game is a change for battle royales, but other than that, the basics of Apex Legends are standard for the genre: scooping up weapons and attachments, outracing an encroaching circle, and murdering your way to the last team standing.
Apex is a tasting menu of battle royale moments, rather than the potato chip jump-die-restart of my Fortnite experiences. There are countless moments to surprise or disappoint yourself. If I don't die immediately upon landing on the game's map, failing to find a gun before someone else does, I tend to last until well into the endgame, surviving multiple brushes with death before I'm downed.
The game's Legends are compelling to choose between, but they lack the personality of Overwatch's characters or the visual flair of Fortnite's myriad skins. You can customise them to an extent, giving them different voice lines and outfits, but I've yet to find any combination of customisations that makes even my favourite Legend, the healer Lifeline, feel like mine.
Instead of being defined by who they are or how fans can customise them, Legends are defined by what they do. Do you want to be hyper-mobile? Choose Pathfinder for his ziplines or Wraith for her portals. Like using your environment? Deploy Bangalore's smoke launcher or Caustic's gas traps. Prefer to use stealth and trickery? Try Bloodhound's tracking abilities or Mirage's decoys. Legends are bodies rather than characters, but those bodies are compelling to inhabit.
Unlike the cartoon clumsiness of Fortnite or the technical crawl of PUBG, Apex characters' movement feels balletic. They can run quickly, slide down hills, and mantle seamlessly up high walls and over obstacles. There's no fall damage, and it's dizzying and thrilling to leap from impossible heights and keep moving.
The game's map feels built for athletic joy, with balloons to rappel up to and dive from into towns designed for shifting from low to high ground. You can cross swathes of the map at a clip, move in and out of fights fluidly, and reposition yourself like a ninja to get that final shot off.
The capable, creative bodies Apex gives me inspire me to live up to them with my tactics. I take risks I don't take in other battle royales. I weave through an explosive airstrike to rescue a teammate. I slide down long hallways to escape danger. I leap from a cliff to surprise an enemy team below. At this point, even just walking around the game makes me feel like a badass.
The actual shooting, in contrast, feels less freeing. Aim drifts, guns recoil wildly, and your magazine is laughably small. You need to find the right attachments and add-ons to counteract weapons' natural tendency to rebel. Even with the perfect load-out, you can find yourself firing frantically in a fight while barely doing damage.
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