Another new battle royale title has dropped, folks, and like the biggest player in the space, Fortnite, it’s absolutely free-to-play. Announced early this morning, Apex Legends is set in the Titanfall universe and is available to download right now.
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Before jumping into a match, you’ll choose to play as one of eight ‘Legend’ characters, each of which has a unique ability like being able to track recent enemy movements, revive players who are low on health, and more. Playing in squads of three, combining the abilities of these characters is where much of Apex’s strategy and meta will come into play.
You can suss out the launch trailer below.
It almost feels like Overwatch crossed with Call of Duty‘s battle royale mode, Blackout. Apex also solves a few of the annoying problems associated with battle royale in its current state. For example, if you die early on in a match, your teammates can resurrect you by grabbing a card from your body and heading to certain points on a map, eliminating the debate of whether to force your pal(s) into watching you play for 20 minutes or simply re-queueing for another game and trying not to suck so hard again.
It also puts one person in charge of the drop with the Jumpmaster system. When the Jumpmaster decides to jump, everyone jumps, so there are no split team situations usually caused by that one person who wasn’t paying attention when everyone else decided on where to go.
There’s no solo mode in Apex Legends, so you’ll either need to play with two other mates or be matched with a pair of strangers. Of course, there’ll be a voice chat system, but also a contextual ping system which points out items, enemies, or locations in a way which actually makes sense. For example, pinging a weapon will tell your team what it is and exactly where it is.
Swapping out your current weapon for a better one is also easier, too. Where other games like PUBG require a certain level of inventory management in these situations, simply picking up a new weapon in place of your current one will automatically transfer all of its current attachments to the replacement, provided they’re compatible.
You can get a rundown of all the gameplay features in the clip below.
Like I mentioned earlier, Apex Legends is free-to-play, but will feature microtransactions and loot boxes. Like Fortnite, these will be entirely cosmetic and have no effect on the power of your characters. In other words, there’s no pay-to-win element, at least not that we’ve seen or heard about so far.
Battle royale has proven to be an extremely popular but rather fickle genre of late. There’s plenty of variety, though some titles tend to do better than others. Fortnite is still on top, but competitors like PUBG have lost a pretty big portion of its player base here in Australia, and CS:GO‘s alternative, Blacksite, is almost non-existent now. I tried to play a match of the latter last night but gave up after sitting in the queue for a good 10 minutes.
You can jump into Apex Legends right now via Origin for PC, as well as Xbox One and PS4 via their respective stores.
