Fortified Nuts

I should have done this when the game was still relevant, but I saw a discord notification and was reminded of this game's existence and thought, "Why not review this one?" And so I went with it. You've more than likely heard of Fortnite. It's a game that got really popular back in about late 2017, and somehow is still generally popular today. Most of the time, I'm deterred from big bandwagon games such as this. However, as it bragged a low low price of free, I went ahead and checked it out after a bit of peer pressure from friends. I played a few rounds and uninstalled the game about a half hour later or so. 

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, whether you be very old or from the distant future of like 2070 something, allow me to explain what Fortnite is. It's a third person shooter game that focuses on a Battle Royale style of gameplay, and boasts a unique mechanic of being able to build things in battle. I don't mean like, crafting weapons, I mean like building walls and stairs and traps and such. Now, you're probably thinking that there's a reason this game got so big and popular, right? Well, if there is one, I can't see it. The game's UI is an absolute hellscape, being more of a mess to navigate than an overly complex RPG. It makes Apple's UI look simple. You'd think that the game would make up for the terrible UI in gameplay, right? Wrong. It follows basic shooting and driving and moving and whatnot, but the building mechanic is implemented terribly. The building and the shooting do not mix. I applaud anyone who managed to jam together such different and polarizing aspects to be good at the game. You have to swap menus from a combat menu to a building menu, switch to your breaking tool, whack enough stuff to give you enough resources to go into a submenu bigger than the original menu itself and go through a whole mess of things to find the correct thing you want to build with the correct resource. This probably could have been implemented way better if the UI wasn't a dumpster fire.

Now, obviously, I have to give credit where credit is due. When it comes to the combat alone, they did a good job. Rarity of items is color coded, it's easy to understand what items are, the Storm mechanic allows the game to not drag on, and the camera/replay mode is really neat. Ah, I should have explained earlier, the Storm is, well, a storm, that continues growing larger, causing the eye of the storm to shrink, which causes the battle area to shrink, which ultimately keeps the combat going until a winner is decided. The replay camera is one of my favorite things about this game, something I wish more games had as a matter of fact. Because of how the game records its replays, you can watch your replay in a multitude of ways. You can watch it in first person, you can watch it in third person, you can freely control the camera to look in places you weren't looking at during your actual play, it's just cool. And keep in mind, it records the entirety of the match, so you can watch from beginning to end, rewind, fast forward, pause, all that great stuff.

Alas, the replay camera does not make up for all of the games shortcomings. With a terrible UI forcing the game to merge two separate mechanics into a gross confusing mess, I'm afraid Fortnite will result in an overall score of 4/10.