Apex Legends - Titanfall Battle Royale: None of the Titans, and all of the "fall"

[Bobnik]

At first I thought I wouldn't really enjoy this game much, mostly because I'd rather have a new Titanfall game. But then I played a bit more, and I dunno, it's actually a pretty good and fun game.

I guess the main takeaway is that I didn't look at it as a Titanfall game, and compared it more to other BR games. My main problem with other BRs, like PUBG, H1Z1, etc is that these games aren't polished. They look pretty janky, sometimes ugly, and the optimization sucks. Fortnite is a bit more polished game with distinct artstyle and it has a bunch of cool one-time in-game events that people enjoy. But with this I don't really enjoy the art-style too much - it's too cartoony for my tastes. CoD's Blackout is also a pretty polished BR game (at least it was during the beta), but you need to pay 60 bucks to play it, and I don't want to pay that much for only 1 part that I'd be playing. It also had the problem that the map was too big and filled with barely anything outside of big points of interest. CSGO? The game's mechanics don't fit that type of the game, at all, so it's just boring overall. 

This game, tho... Its map isn't actually too big, it's filled up more densely, with supply caches coming pretty often, everything actually works (or worked, I dunno how it is right now, since apparently it's doing really well), it has some cool mechanics, it even has some movement mechanics Titanfall has (like running up the wall to get to the higher plane, which gives the map some more verticality; sliding is here, though you can't really bunnyhop now) and's free to play. I actually wanna play some more of the game. Of course, it doesn't have some stuff that I didn't want to see, like locking characters behind a paywall (granted, you can get in-game currency by leveling up, so you will be able to get them eventually), lootboxes being in the game (kinda more forgivable for a f2p game and it's cosmetics only, but still annoying to see), lack of solo mode, etc. But despite all that, Respawn still can make a fun game, even if it's BR.

tl;dr - sucky Titanfall game, but arguably one of the best BR games.

[KHCast]

18 minutes ago, Bobnik said:

granted, you can get in-game currency by leveling up, so you will be able to get them eventually)

Yeah that was the excuse EA used with battlefront and we all know how that played out, so it’s not really excusable here just because it’s a titanfall universe game unless the game is not grindy(which then begs the question why the microtransaction is there to begin with, and no “options” isn’t the answer.) granted I agree it’s fun enough still, but still a shame, and definitely can potentially take my away some of my enjoyment if I feel like these lootboxes and microtransactions are being pushed too much on the player.

[Bobnik]

59 minutes ago, KHCast said:

Yeah that was the excuse EA used with battlefront and we all know how that played out, so it’s not really excusable here just because it’s a titanfall universe game unless the game is not grindy(which then begs the question why the microtransaction is there to begin with, and no “options” isn’t the answer.) granted I agree it’s fun enough still, but still a shame, and definitely can potentially take my away some of my enjoyment if I feel like these lootboxes and microtransactions are being pushed too much on the player.

The comparison with Battlefront is kinda moot, since it was a 60$ AAA title at the time (and even now it still isn't free), while this game is free-to-play out of the bat. You might as well call Fortnite shit because of how that game does monetization - through *le gasp* microtransactions. And outside of the 2 characters, everything else in the game is purely cosmetic. Of course you can say "it's still something you can pay for so it's dumb", and you're not wrong, but there still has to be the way of sustaining the game for the next few months/years. So I will say that, while locking characters in general is dumb, it's only 2 that you'll get eventually while leveling up.

And I wouldn't say the game pushes you to buy anything other than maybe characters (even then, mostly because you see the locked characters during the character select screen), unless you go to the store menu.

That said, I do think lootboxes should completely go when they introduce battle pass in March, having both at the same time is kinda eh.