It’s going to take something special to break my addiction to the Activision/Bungie release Destiny. Several titles have tried to muscle in on my playing schedule since Destiny was first released on PS4 back in September 2014, but it was always the Bungie online multi-player first person shooter I came back to. No game could compare. Destiny is a game I’ve played almost daily since it was first released, I’ve made some good friends online playing it, and in beating the Vault Of Glass (Destiny’s premier Raid) for the first time, one of my greatest gaming moments.
Anticipation for the Destiny sequel was sky-high, 2017’s game of the year was to be released September 6th 2017. It’s was already in the bag, the building blocks were in place. Destiny 2 was going to be the greatest gaming experience ever! WRONG!
Destiny 2 has taken all the bad elements of Destiny and run with them. Rather than cater to the devoted player base, Destiny 2 has been morphed into a game for the new player, the player that wants everything handed to them on a plate. A game where pretty much everything is behind a pay wall. In Destiny, if you wanted a particular armour set you would go out and grind for hours to get it. In Destiny 2 you can pretty much buy/earn what you want when you want it in a few hours.
A case in point, I have spent approaching 5000 hours on Destiny 1 and I was still playing it the day before Destiny 2 came out with pretty much the same enthusiasm as the day I bought it. In Destiny 2 I have spent 277 hours completing everything in the game and I really don’t have any desire to play more than the odd hour a week. I can’t believe how much Activision & Bungie have managed to mess this up so badly!
Suddenly finding myself with free gaming time, I dipped into the various titles left on the shelf due to my Destiny addiction. Doom, Alien, Tomb Raider, Evil Within, Wolfenstein and many more were all played and mostly enjoyed, but what is most surprising to me, is that for all the A+ titles, a game I’d never heard of has really taken over. A game that is actually FREE to play. A game that’s got me back playing online with some of my old Destiny fireteam. I’m starting to clock serious hours into this title, and this title is FORTNITE BATTLE ROYALE!
Fortnite Battle Royale follows similar gameplay mechanics as other battle royale games particularly PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. In Fortnite you can play solo, in duo’s, a four man squad, or for a limited time in a massive 50v50 battle. Supporting up to 100 players, the idea is to be the last man or team standing as you hunt other players and try to avoid being killed yourself. Players parachute down onto an island, landing where they want. Initially armed with nothing but a pickaxe, the idea is to scavenge for weapons, armour, and resources whilst trying to outlive opponents and outrunning the ‘storm’. Over time, a ‘storm’ surrounds the area, and makes it so that the “safe” area of the map shrinks down in size. Once the “safe” area has shrunk, it will generate, at a random location, a smaller circle within and start to shrink again. Those caught in the storm take damage and potentially die if they stay in it too long, so players are constantly being herded to a final stand-off safe point somewhere on the island.
An incredibly simple premise, but some truly fantastic gaming moments are to be had. As well as being great fun to play, the developers behind Fortnite, Epic Games, are giving everyone in the industry a lesson in how to work with its playerbase. Epic are constantly asking questions about the game and what things people like & dislike. It’s no exaggeration that Fortnite Battle Royale has some form of update at least every two weeks, from tweaking bullet fall off to adding new mechanics and weapons. So far, touch wood, they’ve not dropped the ball on this, every update has added something, and on the very rare occasion that an update did break something, Epic immediately rolled the update back. No waiting for a month or two for something to be fixed unlike some of the ‘big boys’.
And please don’t forget, this game is FREE! Yes, there are micro transactions, but they are sensitively positioned within the game and are purely cosmetic. It’s cleverly played by Epic and is obviously working, with a playerbase of over 30 million players, and growing. I can whole heartedly recommend you give this a download. It won’t cost you a penny, what have you got to lose?
I’m delighted to announce my 2017 Game of the Year goes to Fortnite Battle Royale.
Please note Kendall Reviews plays the PS4 version of Fortnite Battle Royale
Epic Games website can be found here
You can download the PS4 version of Fortnite here
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