Apex Legends: First Impressions

After a long enough download phase, I finally gave Apex Legends a shot earlier and, as I said last night, I’m writing my first impressions here now.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way – this isn’t a review this is just a capturing of my first thoughts. This is after all of 30 minutes of play, but that’s enough in a game like this, again, to have some initial impressions. Naturally I’ll grow more used to the game if / when I play it more but that is something that will happen over time — not immediately. It isn’t some be-all end-all coverage of every aspect of the game.

I will of course be addressing some of my thoughts from the previous article in this one, so if you haven’t read that you may want to click here and give it a once over!

That being said, let’s begin!

I had no real issues running the game. Of course, I was playing on an Xbox One X so I had the best hardware for the game how I chose to play it. People have reported issues in getting into games, but I had no trouble at all — within minutes of firing up the game and completing the training I was in a match.

The game has a tutorial but it honestly doesn’t explain much. It basically tells you what you need to know that’s unique to this game and that’s it — if you’re new to Battle Royale, as I am, or shooters in general, then it’s a trial by fire once you get into gameplay. Hell, I originally didn’t even quite know how to get a weapon — I had to realize you had to find a weapons container to even get a gun, which means from the start you better get to a container or your game ends pretty quickly.

Visually the game looks fine – better than I expected – but it does still have a bit of the “Fortnite” look to it, certainly different enough from Titanfall to be a little annoying. The Fortnite similarities don’t end there – the game even uses the same “shrinking play area” mechanic that other games do to force players into a common space. Of course, that kind of makes sense in the long run, and I guess is a staple of these kinds of games (remember, I’ve never played a Battle Royale game before) but it feels like something different could have been done (perhaps roaming titans with instant-kill instructions? That would fit the game world well.) That’s honestly the thing – with as much as this game does that’s unique, I feel like it could have done more than it does. It could have been so much more unique in Battle Royale, but as it stands it’s at least not an outright clone of PUBG or Fortnite.

The character class system (the “legends” in the games title) work well enough, fitting in with various elements of customization from the previous Titanfall games, but it still feels like they didn’t need to be characters as they are – they could have stayed just classes that the player built their characters around, or at least I thought that in the original article until I played the game.

It turns out before each match each member of your squad gets the option to select a legend to play as, but here’s the catch – only one of each is available per team, and it’s a “player A gets first choice, B gets second, C gets 3rd” kind of selection system. Honestly pretty cool, in that it will inevitably force a player to pick someone else, and helps keep teams diverse. I kind of like it.

Actual game play is pretty good. The shooting mechanic feels solid and fair, seeing the damage done to enemies is nice, and the way you use items, heal up, revive allies, and mark out points and items of interest works for me. Really I can’t complain too much about the actual game action as it works well. It’s mostly, if you survive the initial drop, long periods of boredom mixed with moments of panic as a firefight breaks out, but things didn’t feel unfair when I played — the squad with the better setup in the match would usually win out in the end, which is how it should be, with each victory earned.

That being said, the first two matches I played ended pretty quickly – both times before I could even figure out what was going on me and my squad got annihilated. Blame poor drop choices.

The third game is when things got good. I got to choose the drop point and rather than study things, I just went for it. Turns out it was a damn fine spot and we loaded up. None of us had mics, so it was all just a “feel eachother out” kind of team, and that really worked for me — I don’t like talking on Xbox Live. Period. We seemed to “go with the flow” and by the end I kind of took charge of the group, which was pretty cool as that shows I was feeling confident just a few minutes into playing the game.

We got weapons and went exploring. We found a few people in the wild and took them out with minimal issue, but would later get ambushed ourselves. We survived, however, thanks to some spot on teamwork. Cool. We were making our way in. I think we made it to round 4 before we got ambushed one more time and finally met our match but we survived just over 18 minutes. I would want to think that’s pretty good, but the hell if I know.

In the end, I can somewhat see why battle royale has taken off as a genre – it is fun, but still not totally my style. That being said, this game is rather well done and something I can see myself playing more of. While I have some minor gripes here and there, none of that took away from the game to any degree — once I was in, I was having fun, and that’s really the point, right?

Right, that’s that. Again, that’s first impressions and not any kind of proper review or anything like that. I went into the game skeptical and in the end had a fun time playing it — it felt about like any other shooter I’ve played, but different in the overall play goal. Take of that what you will, but if I’m going to be forced for the next decade to live with Battle Royale games, this at least works for me.

More to come, as always.