If the talking heads hate it, it must be good...right?

 

See the guy on the left? He's actually one of the most
 important characters in the game...or is he?

Unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard of Fortnite. If you watch CBS, Fox News, or Channel 9 (imagine Fox News but with even less credibility and an Australian accent) you know all about how it was deliberately designed to addict our kids, get them desensitized to violence and all the other mean, nasty, ugly, horrible things that video games have been accused of for the last half-century or so. If you're like the type of person I hope reads this sort of review, you're thinking “well, if all those type of people hate it, it's gotta be pretty good, right?” Well, after playing it fairly regularly for a few weeks, I can say “Yeah, it kinda is.”

Fortnite is the undisputed king of the Battle Royale games, and offers a unique spin on the BR genre. For those unfamiliar, here's how it works: Armed with nothing more than your trusty pickaxe, you and ninety-nine other people are airdropped from a flying party bus (complete with thumpa-thumpa music) onto a cartoon island to duke it out, the last one standing wins. Once you touch down, it becomes a mad scramble for resources, mainly guns, ammo, and medical supplies. Once you get a gun in your hands you start learning some of the ways that Fortnite sets itself apart from other shooter-type games, namely that the shooting is surprisingly realistic for a game with this sort of cartoon art style. There is no 'uber-weapon' in this game, and it's very much a case of the right tool for the right job. The dingus bunnyhopping around while doing the ol' spray-and-pray at long range with an assault rifle will go down to the woman with the lever action rifle who stands her ground, aims carefully and leads her target, the same way that the woman with the lever action rifle will come out second best inside the residential home to the guy with the shotgun.

If ninety-nine other gun-toting loons weren't a big enough problem, there's the unfortunate fact that the island you dropped into is in the eye of a terrifying pink storm, and every few minutes the eye of the storm shrinks, making the safe area on the island smaller and smaller and pushing the remaining players closer and closer together. This is where Fortnite's other unie trait comes to life: Building. By using your trusty pickaxe (See? There was a reason you were dropped with it!) you can whack on just about everything to harvest rescources, these being wood, brick, and metal. Using these, you can build an array of simple structures: Walls, ramps, etc. Near the end of the game it swiftly bcomes a war of structures where players frantically build ramshackle fortresses to protect themselves from enemy players. Of course, these are visible to everyone else playing, so these buildings swiftly become total bullet magnets. 

Oooh, that can't be good...

With it's combination of cartoon aesthetics and bloodless combat (players reduced to zero health spew all their gear and are instantly teleported someplace, they never say where) it would be easy to write Fortnite off as a 'kiddie game'. But there's actually more to it than seen at first glance. There's actually some plot and story going on, and the publishers reveal it through the time-honored method of 'showing, not telling'. There are things on the island that leave you asking all kinds of questions: What's the big glowing sphere hovering over the center of the island and why is it looking more cracked and broken by the day? Who are IO, and why are they sending squads of total badasses onto the island to attack every player they see? What is 'the loop', and why is one of the NPCs on the island obsessed with it? And why the heck do all the default skins have one of eight faces (four male, four female?) It turns out that there are answers to ALL these questions, and finding them out adds some interest to a game that could get stale fairly quickly if all you did was run around and shoot at people.

Is it absolutely flawless in every way? Of course not. It's a free-to-play game, which means it's gonna wheedle you for cash every chance it gets, with one method being especially frustrating: At the end of each game you're awarded experience points based on how many opponents you defeated, how long you survived, performing certain tasks given to you by NPCs (a personal favorite was from a dog-man in a suburb which was simply to 'ring a doorbell until it breaks') and every time you level up you get a reward...the problem being that 90% of the rewards required you to purchase a 'battle pass' to unlock them.   The other method they hit you up for cash is through the sale of special outfits for your player avatar. Fortunately the publishers do this the smart way and sell items that alter the player experience, but don't influence the gameplay: you may run out your credit card so you look like a total Baron Von Badass, but when you drop onto the island you're still gonna have 100 health and be armed with just a pickaxe.

IN CONCLUSION: Is Fortnite a deep, nuanced game that will challenge you for years to come? No. If your IQ is in the triple digits or you're legally old enough to have a brewski while playing it the novelty will wear off fairly quickly. It's the gaming equivalent of that cutie you had a fling with one summer because their family was in town for vacation: You're not going to be together long, but the time you DO have together will be pretty fun.

RATING: ***