Fortnite review

 Playing Fortnite for the first time, I felt like David Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, except instead of staring into the infinite wonders of the cosmos, I was staring at the infinite blight on humanity.

Well, okay that’s a bit too harsh, but I still hate it, although unfortunately it’s the only thing that my idiot friends are into at the moment so I basically have no choice but to continue playing it in order to maintain what pathetic excuse for a social life I currently have, COVID-19 not-with-standing.

I’ll give it some credit; as it’s the first and so far only battle-royale game I’ve ever played, I went into it with some expectations. Firstly, I was expecting a barrier to entry for someone starting so late, but no; if you’re a new player the matches you join will be full of easy bots for you to practice on while you level up, but only for about 5 or 6 ranks which you can attain within 2 or 3 matches depending on your own previous experience with online shooters, which I would say I have a respectable amount of. I used to play a lot of Call of Duty multiplayer back in the COD4, MW2, Blops 1 days before I got completely bloody sick of those games. And I have a fair amount of Halo multiplayer under my belt for the variety, along with a few other games that I delved into every now and again. I haven’t actually picked up an online multiplayer game in about 10 years though, so you could say I’m fairly out of practise when it comes to things like Fortnite and it fucking shows.

I’m not very good at Fortnite, but I can get in a few kills per game, probably more if I was on my own without the distraction of speaking to the people I chose to associate myself with during my school days that seem to think that Fortnite is an appropriate past time for anyone over the age of 14. Speaking of which, on my first night of playing Fortnite, I had a few games on my own, while my friends were getting in from work, eating dinner, or finishing off their evening wank. But once they were online they waited for me to finish the match I was in while they all got together in a party. Then they sent me an invite...

When I joined their party I was greeted by some weird cartoonish demon-thing, Deadpool, and some kind of fat bearded man dancing to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. That was the moment the cultural stargate truly opened up... but I’m not going to comment on that, I’m just going to continue talking about the game itself.

I quite like the art-style of Fortnite; when most major triple-A games seek to create photo-realistic characters where every individual nostril hair is fully animated and coded with realistic physics it’s nice to see art styles that embrace a cartoonish look to them. Not that there’s any shortage of cartoonish-looking games being developed today, but I easily prefer this sort of style to the previously mentioned realistic look. Not that there’s anything wrong with the realistic look either. The recent Resident Evil remakes would look goofy if they weren’t as realistic-looking as they are. All I’m saying with this long and pointless tangent is that a modern game with a cartoonish look just goes to show that main-stream game developers are still having fun with their creations rather than creating gritty realistic depictions of violence, usually with no gameplay. Anyway, this paragraph has on the whole been a bit of a mess so let’s move on to something else. I like the art style, moving on.

Most of the weapons, I find really difficult to use. I often find that I die fairly quickly to other people, despite me definitely hitting them multiple times. The weapons you can get are fairly basic; pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifle, and sniper rifles and that’s about it. Sure you get a bit of variety within those categories with things like burst rifles and charge shotguns, but I like a shooter that has fun with its weapons, but it seems to me that weapons are the only thing that Fortnite doesn’t have fun with. That was at least true until they recently added in a load of Stark Industries equipment from the Marvel universe, along with fucking Mjolnir, so I guess this complaint has been made redundant.

I have a problem with building in Fortnite. It being a third-person game I decided to start the game by using a PS4 controller rather than mouse and keyboard (I’ve got the PC version), because I’ve never liked using the mouse to move third person cameras in games. However, I having difficulty completing with mouse and keyboard players for the obvious reason that mouse aiming is far superior to thumbstick aiming. I’ve been playing shooters on consoles for as long as I can remember, so I’m fine with using thumbstick for the precise aiming that shooters require, but it still can’t compete with mouse aiming. So for the tactical advantage, I switched to mouse and keyboard a few games in... then my friends started encouraging me to start building. You cannot build on Fortnite when playing with a standard mouse and keyboard. With the right hand on mouse and the left hand on WASD, the controls for building are located on the bottom row of the keyboard, ZXCV I think. Unless you have ten fingers on your left hand, you can’t build and move at the same time on mouse and keyboard. I tried rebinding the keys to the mouse so I can enter build mode, continue moving with WASD, but build with the mouse buttons. Looking at the controls, I figured it was possible to build with the mouse only, but some reason binding a second function to the left mouse button removes the binding for shooting (kind of important for a shooter). So there’s a dilemma to this game: play mouse and keyboard for more precise aiming but no building, or play gamepad, for less precise aiming but the ability to build. To be perfectly honest, I don’t actually care.