Fortnite (PS4) Review

Fortnite is currently the most popular videogame in general (at least according to streaming numbers), therefore a closer look on this game seems more than justified. I still have to disclaim before the review, that I have previously played this game and have not liked it all that much. Nonetheless I will attempt to review Fortnite in an objective manner to find out, which strengths or weaknesses this game might possess and who might be interested in playing and who should stay far away from it. 

Fortnite is not only a Battle Royale game, which admittedly is by far it's most prominent part, but it actually consists of three different areas. Fortnite was first created as a Coop Survival-Shooter, in which players have to fight off waves of zombies in order to survive. What differentiated it from comparable games, was the heavy focus on the building aspect. The developers themselves therefore described the game as a mix of Left4Dead and Minecraft. After the creation of the Free-to-play Version 'Fortnite Battle Royale', the Survival-Shooter Mode was renamed as 'Fortnite: Save the World' and remains pay to play till this day. (Epic originally announced Save the World should become F2P along the road as well, but have since postponed the implementation multiple times.) I have not yet had the chance to play Save the World, but it looks like a fun version of a Survival-Shooter, that stands out because of the Building Aspects. It reminded me a bit of the game '7 Days to die', just with a focus on coop instead of competitive elements. I can of course not judge the quality of the story, but have heard complaints about too much repetitiveness in Save the World.  

Fortnite Battle Royale was published in September 2017 and therefore 2 months after the release of Save the World. It was planned to implement it as an addition to the retail version of Fortnite, but the developers shortly before launch decided to publish it as a standalone free to play version instead. (Since they probably earned way more money with the microtransactions in the f2p game than they could have ever sold retail copies, this seems to have been a smart move.) The basic concept of Fortnite is pretty similar to their competitors. 100 players get dropped into a map, where the last man/team standing wins. Every player starts with a melee weapon and has to loot buildings and others places in order to gain fire weapons, healing- and armour-potions and so on. (Nothing extraordinary so far) The regular mods feature solo, duo and squads, therefore the genre standards. Time-limited funmodes bring a bit of variety into the game. 

The biggest standout feature of Fortnite BR is the big focus on the aspect of building. Nearly no other BR-game even features an element like this, but in Fortnite it will be crucial if players want to compete for the win. Platforms can for example be built to climb ahead of opponents, to prevent falls or to surround yourself with walls for protection. Some players really appreciate this feature and the skill required, while others see it as a big distraction from the real combat and as a cheap way to avoid a gun-confrontation. Looting is especially important in Fortnite in regards to the building, because only the destruction of walls, trees and stones will equip players with the resources necessary in order to produce all the platforms in the late game. 

The second major point of controversy is probably the graphical style of the game and it's presumed targeting group of players. The graphic style can be described as cartoonish and extremely colorful, which in a shooter-gerne can by itself be controversial already. Other more or less successful cartoonish shooters that come to mind would be Splatoon, Realm Royale or Team Fortress 2. Battle Royale games usually include a very large playing map with lots of details, which could potentially demand a lot of PC-Power. (Most PC nowadays however are capable of displaying most BR-Games without problems, but I wanted to at least mention it. On Consoles this is obviously not an issue anyway.) With it's Cartoon look Fortnite should be playable for nearly everybody and appeals much more to younger gamers/children than most of its competitors. The reason for that is, that Shooter games usually have an age restriction and a lot of them are buy to play (Like Black Ops 4, Battlefield 5 etc.) Fortnite doesn't have a high age restriction and because of it's free price and visual presentation very much appeals to young gamers. A substantial group of players probably dislikes the game for its decision to appeal to this very young targeting group and the less serious tone of the game. 

Another aspect that I personally disliked, but that in 2019 is a thing in nearly every f2p game, is that there is too much of a focus on cosmetics. A game should in my opinion mainly be focused on the gameplay and what it has to offer in that department. If you open Fortnite and get on the main menu you will you usually first get strongly advised to visit the ingame shop or asked to buy the battle pass. To be fair it is the way how they earn their money and if you played 2-3 seasons you can finance a battle pass with ingame currency (Not every game with a battle pass offers such a possibility), but I am also not fan of seeing a million of different very weird skins in the game. There are probably more important features, but it did annoy me a little. Positively in regard to cosmetics was in my opinion the feature of victory umbrellas. These umbrellas are simply glider skins, which would be very unremarkable, but they are a cool concept as a reward for achieving a win in the BR-game. I like the idea of rewarding players for their first win in the season. It is a nice extra motivation to get back into the game every season and it probably is extra appealing and inspiring for new players.

The weapons and the gameplay in general work really well in Fortnite. There is large variety of different guns and rifles as well as all the other weapon-standards within the genre. Every weapon has five different forms, that vary in rarity and effectiveness (damage output). There are different weapon colours that signal their effectiveness, and they rank grey, green, blue, purple and gold. Gold obviously being the strongest rank. The higher coloured weapons are naturally better than the lower ones, nonetheless a balance between most weapons in generally can probably be stated. (Shotgun may be a bit stronger, but shotguns are usually very effective in close-combat in nearly every shooter.) In other BR-games there are clearer incentives to get noticeably better weapons, while in Fortnite theoretically all weapons can provide a good performance and gunfights are more determined by shooting- and building skills instead of equipment. This seems positive, but the loot for better weapons can also feel more rewarding in other games. Gunplay itself is fluent and can certainly be described as well done.  

Fortnite launched on PC (Epic Games Store exclusive - You could write a whole article about that issue alone) and on PS4 and Xbox One on console. Later on there have also been ports for the Nintendo Switch and a variety of mobile devices. For the longest time Fortnite allowed players to interact in Crossplay, if you they wanted to, but also allowed to disable that feature and only to play with other players from the same console. Users could also choose to allow crossplay, but only for the same input type. Therefore console players would only play with gamepad users from the PC and mouse and keyboard players only with others players using the same device. Players could also choose to deliberately play in mixed lobbies if they wanted to play with their friends on other platforms. This option was for the longest time voluntary, but that changed with Chapter 2. From now on crossplay is a forced mandatory and players get matchmaked according to their previous game performances/skill instead of input methods. This change obviously was also very controversial. I can understand the reasoning of the developers, but would definitely prefer to give players the option to decide how much crossplay they want to engage in or not.    

     

Fortnite has often been praised for it's stable technical performance and for the most part that praise is warranted. Lots of other competitors in the BR-genre had (and some still have) many more bugs, glitches and server problems than Fortnite. Nonetheless there have been reports about a slight increase in issues with the new graphic engine and map in Chapter 2, but they still seem to be on a very acceptable level. Only during major public events massive server crashes and other issues can definitely be noticed. In terms of technical performance it also has to be noted, that the loading times, if you start up Fortnite are the longest from all BR-games that I have experienced so far. (Around 1-2 mins) The loading times ahead of the matches are much faster and don't deviate from most competitors. Similar to Blackout from Call of Duty, Fortnite recently also implemented a feature to display the BR-mode in Splitscreen. Unfortunately this feature hasn't been working properly since it's introduction and therefore currently remains disabled.

Let's take a short (short???) look on the history of the different Fortnite Seasons to better understand the development of the game. It is important to notice that Fortnite does lots of small changes on the locations of the world map during their Seasons, which gives the players the feeling of being part of a living and breathing world/ a developing storyline. On the other hand this mortality/ ever-changing map design is in my point of view quite disturbing. Every online-multiplayer game will one day probably be shut down, but normally the majority of what you experience in the game stays always the same. These massive changes in Fortnite are in my opinion both a major strength as well as a major weakness. I like the exciting new elements and that the game always stays fresh, while I am left disappoint that I can never replay some of the previous season's well done maps and previous gameplay elements. It is like reading a book, that permanently deletes its old chapters after three months and only offers you the very latest one. For a lot of people this might no be an issue, but I like to go back to games, that I have experienced in the past and am always looking forward to reliving them. Fortnite doesn't deliver that and I certainly prefer other games decision to either only change their map very slightly or to put multiple maps in rotation (probably the preferred option). Obviously Epic could also try to copy the success of WOW classic and implement a new classic version of itself that begins the whole season progress from the start. In any case the following part is a overview of the features of the different seasons:

Season 1 of Fortnite was a lot more rudimentary than the later seasons. There were 13 different named Spots on the Map and some unnamed locations, but most parts of the map looked pretty much alike. There were lots of green areas of nature, which gave the map a very "realistic" way of looking, something that should ultimately change over the course of Fortnite's lifecycle. In Season 1 there was also no Battle Pass introduced so far and cosmetics could only be accessed through an ingame item-shop with XP-Points. Season 1 was important since it introduced many iconic locations like Salty Springs or Pleasant Park and it was the most down to earth map. 

Season 2 featured a medieval/chivalric theme and introduced a couple of new elements. XP-Points for example got cut out of the game and were replaced by a battle pass, which rewarded players with 70 different items, cosmetics etc. The battle pass could be purchased via ingame currency or real life money. Season 2 also introduced a couple of well-known locations like Shifty Shafts, Tilted Towers or the Haunted Hills. This made the game map feel a lot more filled out with different locations and less large open areas between them. A lot of players appreciated this changes, while a few saw it as a step towards an overcrowded map. Season 2 was furthermore the first season with emotes and emoticons (Apparently an important feature nowadays...) 

Season 3 featured a space theme. The battle pass for this season got expended and featured 100 tiers (Levels) instead of the previous 70. Furthermore weekly challenges during the whole season were introduced. It was also the season, which saw the implementation of custom loading screens, different skydiving trails and cosmetic items for the back of the characters, called back blings. Season 3 only introduced one new location with Lucky Landing and avoided any major map changes during the season. Throughout the whole season a comet could be seen far away on the sky, which got a little closer and bigger with every week. In the last days of Season 3 there were even some small meteoroids occasionally hitting the map. This is often referred to as the beginning of the Fortnite storyline.

Season 4 had a super heroes theme and finished the meteor story from the previous season. Between the seasons the meteor arrived at the Fortnite map and destroyed Dusty Depot, leaving only a giant crater in its place. During the course of the season every week different locations changed a little bit, continuing the storyline further. I will not be going into every detail, but some of the major new locations were Risky Reels, an open soccer stadium, a mansion and a villain lair. Highlight of the season was a event called 'Blast off' during which a large rocket was being launched into the sky, where it first flew into a sky-rift and than reappeared heading towards the map and hitting even more rifts till one of the rifts left a giant crack in the sky symbolizing a collision between multiple universes.  

Season 5 continued the previous seasons story and chose 'Worlds Collide' as it's theme. A few elements of the real world, like a viking ship and ancient ruins, spawned through the rifts of the previous season on the map. As part of a promo-activity Epic also presented a Burger-Symbol from the game in a real life desert to show the transition between the worlds. The map changed quite a bit in Season 5. The whole southeast part of the map, which previously featured a swamp and trees and flowers, turned into a big sandy desert. Multiple Locations like Lazy Links and Paradise Palms were either introduced or replaced previous locations. The crater from Season 4 grew full of plants again and many other locations also kept changing during the whole Season. It was the first season to introduce a vehicle, that could host a full squad with players and to bring toys like golfballs or basketballs into the game, that players could interact with. Furthermore, multiple time-limited funmodes were introduced, which should mix things up and aimed to bring more variety to the game. The main event of Season 5 featured a purple cube, nicknamed Kevin, that appeared after the giant crack in the sky closed. The cube moved around the map and in the event finally arrived at the Loot Lake, where it sank and apparently dissolved. The loot lake turned purple after this and the water switched into some kind of trampoline instead.  

Season 6 theme was 'Darkness rises' and immediately continued the previous story around Kevin. The cube reappeared and created through dark power a floating island above the Loot Lake. The dark power also created shadow stones on different locations around the map, which corrupted their respective areas and left them purple. Players that interacted with these shadow stones temporarily transformed into invisible shadow creatures. In addition to the Floating Island and the corrupted areas, Haunted Castle and the Cornfields were introduced as new locations. Season 6 was the first to implement companion pets as cosmetics into the game and gave the players the ability to customize their background music in Matchmaking-Lobbies. The main event of the season featured the cube on the floating island to rapidly spin around till it exploded and destroyed the entire universe. Players got sucked into some area called 'The inbetween', where they got touched by a butterfly, which somehow recreated the whole Fortnite map excluding the previously corrupted areas. 

Season 7 was called 'You better watch out' and introduced a new storyline featuring an ice-war. A giant iceberg collided with the Fortnite-map and turned half of the western part of the map into a snowy ice-region. On top of the iceberg Sergeant Winter appeared with a small army and declared war to the ice king and his followers. Multiple locations like Flush Factory and Greasy Grove got covered in snow and therefore changed their apperance. Flush Factory also changed its name into Happy Hamlet and new places like Frosty Flights and Polar Peak were introduced as well. A plane called X-4 Stormwing and an extremely powerful weapon named Infinity Blade made its debut in Season 7. The Infinity Blade was in fact so powerful that Epic removed it from The BR-mode very soon to restore weapon balance. Season 7 was also the first to introduce wraps, that allow players to customize the skin-colours of weapons and vehicles. During the Christmas holidays Epic introduced a smaller event called '14 days of Fortnite', that allowed players to participate in even more funmodes and gain a couple of extra items. Other side-events were the New Years Celebration and a Marshmello-Concert (Apparently a famous musician). The main event of the season on the other hand was the 'Ice King Event'. During this event the Ice King broke free from his prison in a block of ice and in his wrath temporarily covered the entire Fortnite map under Ice and snow.  

The name of Season 8 was 'X marks the spot' and it featured a pirates theme. A giant volcano arose on the northeast of the map and together with an army of pirates, who arrove at the beginning of the season, they very much changed the northerneast of the map. Sunny Steps replaced Wailing Woods and Lazy Links switched to being Lazy Lagoon. Some of the ice in the western part of the map also began to melt and bring grass and flowers back to some locations like Snobby Shores. Season 8 was special since it was the only season so far, who allowed players to relatively easy get a Battle Pass. Players only had to fulfill 13 smaller challenges to unlock the Season 8 Battle Pass for free. This very likely happened because of the stiff competition from Battle Royale Giant Apex Legends at this point of time. Fortnite also seemingly took inspiration of Apex Respawn Model and pinging possibilities and implemented Respawn Trucks and their own ping system towards the end of the season. One of the time-limited funmodes in season 8 was called 'Floor is lava' and let lava constantly be rising from the ground till the end, when the whole map was covered by flame and fire. The main event of the season was the 'Unvaulting event', in which a bunker near Loot Lake opened its doors and brought players back to the 'Inbetween' Universe, where they could collectively choose a weapon to be unlocked before being brought back to the Fortnite map. Upon their return the giant volcano erupted and destroyed big parts of Retail Row and Tilted Towers. 

Season 9 was named 'The future is yours' and therefore also featured a futuristic theme. This theme was partly explained by the Season 9 Trailer, in which one of Fortnite's main characters named Jonesy sprinted together with a Banana-Person called Peely into a bunker to escape the volcano eruption. They much later got freed and stepped out of the bunker into a futuristic city. Therefore the previously destroyed Tilted Towers and Retail Row changed into the futuristic cities of Neo Tilted and Mega Mall. The giant volcano also got replaced by a facility called Pressure Plant. One of the main new features of the season was the introduction of slipstreams, that blew air and allowed players to travel the map in a very fast manner. The season also launched sky platforms, that very much resembeld the supply ships from competitor Apex Legends. The main event of season 9 was an exciting battle between a giant monster and a robot, resembling Godzilla and Transformers. The event was called 'The Final Showdown' and it already looked like Godzilla would triumph after ripping the robots arm off, but the robot finally ended up victorious and afterwards flew into the sky. As a result of the battle an energy orb called 'The Zero point', above the Loot Lake bunker/vault, began to slowly crack.

Season 10/X was called 'Out of Time' and it's theme was time itself. S10 was the final part of Chapter 1 of Fortnite and it's storylines. The season began with the zero point orb from the previous season exploding and creating a break of time and space. Jonesy apparently traveled through a place outside of this time and space relation, where he saw several key items and persons of the previous seasons like the giant rocket, the cube, pirates and Peely. Then Jonesy was sucked back to earth, which apparently created an alternative timeline, with all the highlights of the previous seasons mixed together in the season 10 map. These areas which changed back to the status of previous seasons are called Rift zones. Some of the most important are Tilted Town, Loot Lake and Moisty Palms. Newly added to the map was a Fortnite Version of Gotham City and the giant Meteor from Season 4, which is stuck in time, but during the whole season threatened to hit the map. One of the biggest gameplay changes of Season 10 was the introduction of powerful robot-mechs, which were called 'B.R.U.T.E.'. Many players called these mechs the most unbalanced addition to the game and therefore also made Season 10 the most controversial of all Fortnite Seasons. In comparison to the Infinity Sword the Mechs were not removed for balancing issues, since they took such a prominent position in the promotion of the season, and they did find appreciation from other players. Main Event of the season was 'The End'. It was started by the rocket from season 4 being launched again and this time creating multiple cracks in the sky at once from which multiple rockets appeared, which all flew in front of the giant Meteor creating another crack, that sucked the whole meteor in it. Another even bigger crack in the sky appeared afterwards and released an energy orb like the one from season 9 on the Fortnite map. Shortly after the Meteor reappeared from the same sky crack and crashed into the energy orb, creating a black hole that sucked in the whole map and everything on it. The entire Fortnite game was from this point on paused for 48 hours and all players logging into the game were only brought to the black hole. 

Chapter 2 Season 1 (Instead of Season 11) was named 'A new world' and started with a big bang making the black hole disappear and in the process creating an entirely new Fortnite BR-map. Pleasant Park, Salty Springs, Retail Row and Risky Reels are the locations from the Chapter 1 Map that have returned, but all the other Chapter 2 locations are completely new, giving the map a vastly different feeling than previous iterations. There are also a noticeable number of changes implemented in order to signal that Chapter 2 is a new beginning for Fortnite BR. The BR-map for example now needs to be discovered to show you all available locations. This reminds me a bit of RPGs, where exploring is often a big focus. Chapter 2 also introduced a bunch of new weapons and items, like the ability to fish for better weapons on lakes and a weapon that shoots health potions to heal squadmates. The ability to hide in the environments (Dumpsters and hay bales for example) was implemented as well as a revision of the swimming ability. The water physics seem to have generally been improved. Rivers can now have different water streams that can assist or burden you in swimming. The new speedboats also seem to be the most important vehicle/mount on the new map.

The Battle pass was also reworked and features now a xp-system to process, a little bit similar to that of Chapter 1 Season 1. This season is furthermore supposed to be by far the longest season of the game with a lifespan of nearly 4 months. A main event has not happened yet, but can be expected for late January or early February 2020. (Just as I wrote this review a big Star Wars event happened, where a scene of Episode 9 was released within the game and players got a stormtrooper blaster rifle and various light sabers as time-limited additional weapons in the game. As one could expect they are pretty OP and kind of destroy the weapon balance, but enjoyable nonetheless.) The biggest difference of the game however was the implementation of Bots in Chapter 2. The very first match of any player will be a game with bots only and in regular matchmaking a portion of players will always be bots. This was probably done in order to appeal to more casual players, but it obviously also lead to rising frustrations by more competitive gamers. The game's visuals have according to the developers also been improved in Chapter 2. I recognize slightly more details and generally brighter colours, but not a big difference overall. More experienced Fortnite players however have told me, that they think the changes are very significant.

In late 2018 the third part of Fortnite named 'Fortnite Creative' was implemented into the game. Fortnite Creative is a level editor, that allows players to create totally unique levels to their tasting. Players can create fun maps, battle arenas, adventure maps or racing tracks for example. The editor reminded me a bit of Super Mario Maker, where users can also create levels and share them with a giant online community of millions of players. One restriction of the creative maps are that they are limited to a maximum of 16 players. Therefore custom Battle Royale Maps with up to 100 players will probably never happen. The creative mode has a hub, in which all players start and where some of the most popular user created maps are being featured. If users want to engage in other maps, they simply have to enter a 12-digit code unique to every map in order to enter them. Since Fortnite Creative is free to all players, there is a big variety of different maps in the game. A lot of other games got either referred to or some maps even being recreated with the Fortnite engine. There are for example rebuild zombie maps from different Call of Duty games, like 'Der Riese' and 'Nacht der Untoten'. I also found a map that copied Dead by Daylight and ported the gameplay pretty faithful into the Fortnite universe. Personally I enjoyed the adventure maps the most and would highlight the maps 'The Legend of Zelda: Full Original Map' and 'Fourth Dimension'. The Zelda map attempted a recreation of the full world map of the original Zelda and it's dungeons. Fourth dimension is a little campaign within Fortnite Creative. It features 6 different levels, which all contain hidden secrets and a far-reaching storyline. The fourth dimension isn't going to totally blow you away, but it is pretty fun, especially if you consider that it is a first attempt on a player created campaign. Fortnite Creative already has much to offer and is probably only going to grow in the future. An opportunity for improvement would be to lower the restrictions on the number of possible objects for the map, the player number and maybe even allow the use of player created items and tools in the mode. 

Result:

Your attitude towards Fortnite Battle Royale will depend on your attitude towards the building aspect. Millions of people love it for this feature, while millions of other people dislike it for the very same reason. I personally gravitate towards the later group, but nonetheless have to acknowledge that Fortnite's gameplay is at least decent. I would subjectively probably rate the Battle Royale a 5-6/10. Fortnite Creative on the other hand was great fun and showed me a world of possibilities, like you normally only experience in games like Super Mario Maker. A couple of Elements for Fortnite Creative could/should still be implemented to get to the next level, but I would currently rate this 8/10. Fortnite: Save the World also looks interesting and I will be giving it a closer look, as soon as it turns F2P. Ultimately I would rate Fortnite at this moment a 6,5-7/10. Fortnite is a controversial game and players will likely either be very fond of the game or dislike it. I nonetheless urge everybody to extend the perception of the game beyond the Battle Royale Mode and see that Fortnite has things to offer for different kinds of players.

6.5-7/10