REVIEW

Fortnite Early Access Review

by Jake Stewart, August 9th, 2017

Epic Games’ new title Fortnite is out now on early access, giving players a glimpse of a promising but currently very flawed foundation of a full title. Fortnite’s development has been a long and rocky road. The clouds had finally started to clear and it seemed that Fortnite would come out as everything we had hoped it would be. Fortnite as a concept has a lot of promise, but the current version falls flat. This review is based on the game in it’s current form, and will be reevaluated when the full release launches in 2018.

The game is level-based, players join an online match either with friends or strangers and are given an objective to defend. The first 15-20 minutes of a level is generally finding the objective, gathering materials, searching for items or survivors and building defenses. Once the team deems they are ready, the objective can be activated, summoning monsters intending to destroy your objective. This portion almost always feels a lot shorter than the preparation, as the entire defending phase ends up taking 5-10 minutes at most. Once the round ends, the victors collect their spoils and move onto the next map.

The building system itself is fantastic, extremely polished and very well thought-out. Foundations, walls, and traps snap together with ease. The style is reminiscent of the building system in Fallout 4, but feels much less cumbersome. Unfortunately, an overwhelming amount of time will be spent rebuilding your creations and it’s not because of the monsters. After a mission is finished, that session is completely irrelevant. The buildings and defenses created simply disappear, making it rather hard to put much creativity and care into a fortress. The building system can be amazing, but having to rebuild the same fortress around another random objective feels much too repetitive. There is a home base that keeps the defenses from previous rounds, and this allows you to continue adding on as time goes on. These levels very infrequent compared to the regular missions, but offer a nice break from the style of the other missions.

Fortnite’s biggest issue right now is repetition. The location changes each mission, but they all feel and play exactly the same. Fortresses must be rebuilt every mission so an absurd amount of time ends up being spent on searching houses for parts and materials. Mining materials out of things takes way too much time to be engaging, and feels like something to just add extra time in each mission.

Progression in the “story” requires doing some amount of in-game tasks to move onto new missions. Some quests require repeating levels a number of times to move on. This causes a lot of cases where you have to play the same mission over and over again until you can progress, and this can feel pretty exhausting. Other missions require searching for survivors or chests during the preparation, and these don’t feel much better. These require a lot of searching through buildings, caves, etc. until you find the required items. Repeating this grind makes searching and mining an almost fifteen minute stint and it is a big obstacle from playing the fun parts of the game. Fortnite could benefit immensely from having a sandbox or endless waves mode. It’s honestly baffling how perfectly these modes would mesh in a game like Fortnite and are completely absent. The mission-based model seems very aversive to the very game design that Fortnite wants to have.

Once all of the preparation ends, Fortnite has a very engaging and fun combat system. Enemy types are varied, creative and come in very large numbers. From physical, ranged, and a slew of explosive attacks, no two enemy types feel exactly the same. Despite the negative aspects of Fortnite, I found myself wanting to return for the combat. Player movement is quick, creating a fast paced session of running, jumping and slashing. Epic Games has a history of shooters, and this shows itself in the gun play of Fortnite. Shooting feels tight and polished, enemy hit-boxes feel accurate, and the movement is fun. The combat as a whole is where Fortnite really shines. On the downside, the combat never gets past “pretty easy” so even that can grow old without any challenge. Fortnite could benefit from ramping up the difficulty on the end-game content.

Outside the missions, menus feel very cluttered, convoluted and offer very little instruction on how everything flows. There a multitude of pages full of stats and micro-managing to keep track of and it ends up blending together. You could spend time learning how to optimize your upgrades and stats, but there really isn’t any point to. With how easy the difficulty is, it makes all these stats and upgrades feel somewhat unnecessary. Crafting bullets, weapons, and materials is explained but still remains somewhat confusing at first. All this time spent studying how everything works and navigating menus is time spent not enjoying the game. This seems to be Fortnite’s biggest issue, as the amount of time doing mundane tasks greatly outnumbers the enjoyable moments.

Something Fortnite does very well is the art direction. The art style is colorful and gorgeous. The world as a whole is a pleasure to see and the models of the objects and characters are outstanding. While Fortnite only has two types of maps, Forest or Suburbs, the visuals keep them from ever getting old. The voice acting is fantastic as well. This often can get overlooked in a game like this, however a lot of care was put into the casting. Every character flows with emotion, so much so that I found myself looking forward to the next voice performance. For example, the robot adviser Ray, is an especially enjoyable aspect of the game. She is always full of movement, emotions, jokes, and feels like a very real character.

Fortnite has the foundation of a game that could be very enjoyable, and being that it is an early access title there is plenty of time to refine itself. In order for it to be a successful title, it needs to trim the fat off of itself and make it so the fun parts of the game aren’t completely covered up by the mundane. Some improvements need to be made with difficulty as well, to call for more strategic building and organization. While the game plans to be released as a F2P game, it has a $40 price tag for the EA version. In the current version of the game, I cannot recommend it at its current price tag. Fortnite has the potential of a great game, but needs to streamline the boring parts in order to reach it.