After a not-so-surprising surprise reveal on Monday, Respawn Entertainment’s Apex Legends is out in the wild and free to play for all. After a couple of hours with the game it’s clear that while it is definitely not Titanfall, it shares some of the same DNA that makes the series great along with some fun new mutations.
Apex Legends is part-battle royale and part-hero shooter, mixing the colorful abilities and personalities of Overwatch with the tight shooting and mechanics of Call of Duty’s Blackout. In Apex Legends these characters are known, unsurprisingly, as legends. Each Legend has unique and enjoyable roles and abilities. Some are more support focused, like Lifeline and her healing capabilities, or more combat-focused like Gibraltar and his dome shield and explosive air support. Like many games these days, legends in Apex Legends have both abilities and Ultimate abilities which are, surprisingly, not incredibly frustrating to play against. My personal favorite legend was Lifeline, a combat medic whose passive ability allows her to throw up a large shield anytime she’s reviving a teammate. That said, I almost always want a Gibraltar or Bangalore on my team for their offensive artillery ultimates and Gibraltar’s large dome shield. I really appreciate Apex Legends’ character pick set up, where players on a team get 1st, 2nd and 3rd character picks, denying duplicates and allowing for a little team composition planning.
As with other Battle Royale games, every round has a slew of constants and variables that make each round familiar but fresh. The rules stay the same; all players drop out of a ship as it traverses a pretty large map and have to collect random loot to survive against dozens of other players all the while trying to stay within a constantly shrinking zone.
What makes Apex Legends really special is how it differs from the competition and how those differences effect the moment to moment gameplay. First off, while other Battle Royale games have squad-modes, Apex Legends is exclusively squad-based with 20 teams of 3 vying for the chance to be last man standing. Normally, this would introduce a mess of communication and coordination issues and would put those who don’t form their own parties at a huge disadvantage.
Apex Legends solves many of these communication issues with the best in-game communication tools that I’ve seen in a battle royale. In place of a traditional chat wheel is an adaptive ping system that feels like a hybrid between Rainbow Six Siege’s pings and Battlefield’s tagging. Even without voice communication I found myself effectively coordinating with my teammates by marking where we should explore, what items I found and where they are, and where I last spotted an enemy. The system is very intuitive and useful, and while it doesn’t completely make up for the lack of voice communications it comes pretty damn close. Further aiding teamwork is Apex Legend’s thoughtful drop system. Instead of dropping alone, players drop together after one of their three squad members is randomly selected to be jumpmaster and effectively control the drop. While you can manually split from the pack, I found that most groups opted to stay together and drop with their jumpmaster. All of these innovations in communication and coordination make the game much less frustrating to play with random groups and callouts are much more precise in any team.
What is perhaps the most unique and possibly my favorite mechanic is Apex Legends is the ability for players to respawn. What? Respawning in a battle royale game? I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s not unbalanced. Basically, when any player in Apex Legends is killed for good they leave a crate with their player card drops to the floor. This crate can be looted by enemies as one would expect, but teammates can actually retrieve their teammate’s player cards and go to any of the two dozen or so respawn beacons on the map to respawn their teammates. This is a great way to combat so many issues that are apparent in other battle royale games. In most battle royale games a squad-on-squad fight can leave a player or two dead on the winning team, forcing the dead players to simply spectate for the rest of the match and the team to carry on at a numbers disadvantage. In Apex Legends, the team that wins a fight can regroup and live to fight another day effectively, or in my case, the team whose sole survivor hauls ass. In one of my winning rounds yesterday both of my teammates were slain in battle. After defeating their killer and hiding out for what felt like ages, I picked up their player cards and ran through gunfire and many obstacles to a respawn beacon. We spent the next few minutes stealthily looting up with anything we could find and managed to kit up enough to win the match.
There are a few smaller mechanics that, while they don’t exactly rock the boat, add some nice flair to Apex Legends. Every match is narrated by an omniscient announcer who highlights first blood, new rounds and so on. At the beginning of each match a player and their team are highlighted as champions, often times just after winning a match themselves, and grant additional rewards for defeating them. Adding to this rather enjoyable gameshow vibe are frequently placed billboards on the map that show either the champion or leading team. Another fun feature is the game’s live tracking of who the kill leader is in a match, announcing every time the kill leader is killed or when a new player has taken the title. Not only do these features lighten the mood, but they produce a feeling of being on a game show as opposed to being dropped in to some screwed up murder scenario.
Despite not featuring Titans or wall-running, Apex Legends clearly shares a universe with Titanfall. Each and every weapon in Apex Legends is from the Titanfall series, a major boon for me as I didn’t have to familiarize myself with an entirely new cast of weapons. If you’re unfamiliar with the Titanfall series, the weapons it features are not only militaristic sci-fi weapons but often cleverly unique in some aspect of their use. For example the Devotion LMG ramps up its fire rate over time, generating a mini-gun type of feeling that was equally devastating and satisfying at close range.
The map in Apex Legends isn’t drastically different from that of any other battle royale game, but it does have a few features that lift it up from just being another large and pretty map. Apex Legends wouldn’t really be a Titanfall game if it didn’t have some form of unique traversal options. To fill the gap of wall-running and speedy mechs are the frequent use of ziplines and vertical ropes that allow players to move quickly from one place to another. These environmental traversal options, in tandem with character abilities, rather speedy sliding and zero fall damage, really made the rather large map feel conquerable and often freed me up to move a bit cleverly in combat. Although my favorite aspect of the map has to be how the loot is handled. At the beginning of every match a random location on the map is marked as an area with heightened loot, creating a centralized cornucopia of sorts with both huge risk and reward. If that option sounds a bit too risky for you, as it proved for me, there are also flying dropships that you can land on with just enough loot to comfortably kit a single squad. Because of their limited size and because they’re airborne in nature, these flying fortresses often granted unique and isolated fights immediately on landing, assuming we actually hit the damn thing as it flew. Every zone on the map has an overall loot level that comes associated with the same risk reward dynamic, making for a lot of opportunity and diversity when selecting the drop zone. Aside from mechanics, Apex Legends really nails that alien feeling so well captured in the Titanfall series, featuring titanic lumbering creatures, a familiar yet foreign landscapes and a very lived-in sci-fi feel.
Now, the elephant in the room. Apex Legends is a free-to-play title developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by EA. If any of you keep up with the trend, ⅔ of those facts may cause some alarm. However, I’m happy to report that the microtransactions and the in-game economy did not feel unfair or in any way unfair. Aside from 2 character unlocks at launch, everything purchasable with real-word money was cosmetic, and oh boy are there a ton of cosmetics. Even the characters that can be purchased with premium currency can be unlocked with in-game currency, similar to how DLC characters work in Rainbow Six Siege, only much cheaper. After a single day of gameplay I have half of the funds required to purchase one of the two characters. Loot boxes are awarded frequently, their drop chances are posted in game and they have some form of drop protection with legendary items. It doesn’t seem possible to earn everything without using at least some premium currency, but definitely enough to satisfy my fashion needs.
Apex Legends isn’t Titanfall 3, but what it is is a great battle royale title that diversifies itself from the competition with a unique and colorful sci-fi world with ability-based characters. I’ve enjoyed my time in Apex Legends immensely, racking up three action-packed wins in the last day. With short rounds, high octane action and a unique meta game, I think I’ll be playing Apex Legends for quite some time.
