Fortnite: A Love/Hate Relationship of Inconsistency

Quick Summary: Hey! Just in case you’re here for the important stuff, here’s a quick summary.

Overall score: 5/10, Good game, Arrogant developers.

Playtime: Nearly Infinite

Graphics: You’re gonna need a beefy one for this game, boys.

Good: Unique Mechanics

Bad: Incredibly inconsistent, Devs punish players for being good at the game.

If you want more in depth review, read the full one below!

Fortnite: Battle Royale is a game developed and published by Epic Games that was released in September of 2017. It was originally a bonus game mode for Fortnite: Save the World introduced to give fans something to plan while STW was in beta testing. However Save the World was eventually put on life support after the Battle Royale part of the game became a historically astronomical success. Since it’s release, Fortnite has become a culture icon of internet and gaming history.

The Premise of the game is very simple: Don’t die. At it’s core, Fortnite is a very basic shooter, and with it’s flaws some would even consider it to be a subpar game due to things like RNG damage, and poorly optimized hit registration. However, what gives Fortnite it’s charm is it’s pairing of 2 completely unique and deceptively simple mechanics: Building and Editing. These mechanics elevate this game from a cartoonish PUBG rip off to a highly addictive, unimaginably popular shooter. So popular in fact, there’s probably an 80% chance you’ve already played it yourself.

I’m writing this review as an Ex-Competitive player who’s had a love/hate relationship with Fortnite, I hardcore grinded Arena (the game’s competitive mode) and Cash Cup Tournaments for 2 years. I have a few thousand hours logged in game from my competitive years, and I’ve experienced almost everything in the game just shy of World Cup and FNCS. I could write a full novel reviewing every aspect of this game that I’ve spent hundreds of hours in. But instead I’m just going to make a generalized review for now.

The Love

The unique mechanics in Fortnite are what’s always brought me back to the game even all the desk smashing max level rage quits. No other game has had Building and Editing mechanics like Fortnite. These mechanics seem incredibly simple, but in reality are some of the most complicated and skillful game mechanics ever created. However, I’m not the only one who's seen that, and thus building and editing has evolved exponentially over time and even more so when the players were given easier access to practice methods such as Creative mode and Battle Lab. Over the years, the use of Fortnite’s mechanics have evolved from simple Minecraft-esque building like this

To fast paced, and often buggy action like this (courtesy of my own rusty skills)

Fortnite’s unique mechanics are unmatched and are incredibly fun (when they work properly). The uniqueness of Fortnite’s mechanics is what brings people to the game to begin with and is a huge part of the game’s fast paced adrenaline saturated action.

Fortnite’s core game mode is Battle Royale, but with the addition of Creative mode players have created several thousand separate game modes to keep casual and try hard players entertained alike. Anything from free for all deathmatches to old school gmod style prop hunt, and even the (definitely not among us inspired) murder mystery game modes like Imposters. Over the years, Creative has become it’s own platform for creation. So even when you’ve slammed your desk 1 ½ million times due to your deaths in Battle Royale, you can still find (hopefully less rage inducing) entertainment. This creates excellent universality within the game; are you looking for some simple fun with your friends? Creative and it’s thousands of own game modes. Looking for intense adrenaline filled action? Battle Royale. Are you an old school try-hard super sweat looking for a challenge? Arena. This universality is what makes Fortnite such a hugely successful and charming game, it has something for literally everyone and thus almost literally everyone plays it.

However, in my 1700 hours of experience, I can tell you that Fortnite isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. It’s home to some hidden away downright awful game design when it comes to it’s underlying details.

The Hate

Don’t get me wrong, Fortnite’s unique building and editing mechanics hide away the game's smaller flaws quite well. But when you’re a competitive player looking to climb the ladder, the errors in Fortnite’s small details stack up and reveal some serious negligence on the developers' parts. If you read in between the lines, Fortnite doesn’t follow some of the basic mechanics that almost all shooters share in order to create a fair fighting environment, such as having fixed damage rates for guns. Fortnite uses an RNG system to calculate damage from most guns, meaning that even a perfectly placed full pellet headshot with a shotgun has a decent chance at doing 19 damage. Whereas in other popular E-sports shooters such as CS:GO, each weapon has it’s damage fixed for each part of the body it hits. For example, in CS:GO an AK-47 will always do 108 damage to an armored opponent’s head no matter what, however in fortnite certain guns don’t have fixed damage values, most notably shotguns. A perfect headshot can do anywhere between 18 to 180 damage. This creates an unfair fighting environment, even if your opponent is worlds behind you in terms of skill, the game can simply decide that you don’t get the kill by making your shot do 18 damage as opposed to 180 and on the other side your opponent gets the 180 shot placed perfectly on your head and almost instantly kills you. This small detail creates a substantial and aggravating flaw in Fortnite’s game design.

However Fortnite’s biggest killer is the way the Devs cater to the demographics within Fortnite.

While the common sense thing to do in a game as popular as Fortnite would be to separate the casual and competitive loot pools in order to ensure environments where money/elo is on the line remain balanced and skilled players are rewarded for being skilled players, Fortnite does quite literally the exact opposite. The developers often add overpowered and no or low skill required weapons in order to give lesser skilled players guaranteed bailouts against players with greater skill. These weapons are often near-impossible to counter and are specifically designed to give low skill players an unfair advantage over high skill players, acting as a almost guaranteed bailout. These kinds of items are always added to both public and competitive playlists, giving people like your great grandma the ability to jump into a fight with a T1 Professional player and have a decent chance at winning within seconds. With the addition of weapons like these to competitive playlists, it discourages players who have worked hard to attain their skill level from keeping on the grind and continuing with playing Fortnite all together. While on the opposite side of things, it lessens the need for casual players to learn the mechanics of Fortnite that attracted it’s following to begin with afterall, why would you bother with building and editing when you can win a fight almost instantly by holding down your fire button for a few seconds?

This phenomenon creates a severe detriment to the game’s overall quality by discouraging good players from continuing to play and removing the incentive for new players to learn the game’s core mechanics. Because why would I go through all that trouble of learning to build if I can win 80% of my fights by holding down my fire button while moving forward? This kind of behavior seems to be fully endorsed by Epic due to their lack of action and lack of response to feedback. This behavior has led some of the best of the best professional players to quit the game entirely and is personally a big contributing factor in what led me to quit my pursuit of a career in Fortnite’s E-sports scene. And this long winded almost essay-like article explaining the biggest parts of Fortnite’s bad side doesn't even begin to explain other small details like the game's vividly inconsistent hit registration, or extreme ping dependence in fights, or lack of competent anti-cheat. So many little inconsistencies in this game stack up and create irritating or overall unfair situations, especially in the competitive scene.

The Final Verdict:

Personally, I love Fortnite. But it’s constant inconsistencies and the developers’ stubbornness have eroded this once nostalgic and beautiful game into a buggy mess of sweats and… well… literal children. Fortnite isn’t what it used to be, that’s for sure. It’s still beautiful, just for different reasons. I can’t really make a generalized verdict for this game because I’ve experienced both sides of it. So instead I’ll leave you with this.

If you’re simply looking for a fun, action packed game to play by yourself or with friends, and you’re not worried about all the tiny elements of design in the games you play or worried about getting better at the game in general, I would highly recommend this game to you. From a casual perspective, it’s a playground worthy of hundreds of hours of play.

But if you’re like me, and love competitive gaming, and you want a game that will challenge you to become a good player or if you want game that you can make a career out of, or even if you want a game where you can learn from every death until you’re eventually one of the best, to put it simply, if you’re looking for a sport instead of a game, Fortnite is one of the worst to pursue that in. Despite the casual community dwindling, and the outcry from the competitive community, Epic Games has consistently refused to treat Fortnite like what it is, a sport. And thus, trying to treat it like a sport yourself will likely result in you banging your head into a brick wall and wasting thousands of hours practicing and grinding to become a good player just to consistently get killed almost instantly by little Timmy and his 5 combat SMGs.

So I leave Fortnite with it’s final rating of 5/10, excellent game, arrogant developers.