Almost every every gun has a unique personality. The lever-action Peacekeeper shotgun fires individual pellets in a star-shaped pattern, while the faster EVA-8 Auto spits out a 3x3 square. The Triple Take is another highlight, a sniper rifle that throws a horizontal spread of three shots with every trigger pull, easing the pressure of landing those long-range tracking shots.
The main thing is there's something for everyone: semi-auto rifles, auto rifles, LMGs, and SMGs. Weapon stats are improved by finding and equipping attachments scattered all over the map, which is where I thought Apex would lose me. Inventory management is still the worst part of battle royale. I hate sorting through PUBG’s perplexing assortment of scopes and stocks, but Apex auto-equips anything better than what I already have on a compatible weapon. You can dig around and swap some attachments between weapons, or opt for a lesser scope if you prefer it, but I love that I can let Apex run on autopilot and choose what’s best for me.
Pinging's darkest magick is its ability to make playing with strangers as worthwhile as playing with friends.
If everything sounds familiar so far, that’s because Apex doesn’t deviate much from the PUBG formula. It’s Respawn's particular interpretations of those ideas that make Apex feel so special. Besides the diverse roster of characters with unique abilities, communication is probably the best example of this. The lack of a solos mode (although a recent leak indicated it's on the way) at launch is intentional. Apex is a shooter that encourages kinship between squadmates, whether it’s concentrating fire on a single target, coordinating abilities, or donating the Devotion LMG you just found to a friend in need.
Enter the 'ping' system, an ingenious, object-sensitive tool used to draw attention to locations, items, enemies, and objects that might be of interest to your squadmates. I don't want to go back to Fortnite or PUBG or any game unless the entire industry agrees to implement something like it in all multiplayer games forever and ever, amen. It's that simple and invigorating.
You'll use it most often to mark where you're headed, but if the reticle is over an enemy, the marker will turn into a red crosshair and your character will note they've spotted someone. Ping an open door and they'll remark someone's probably been there. Ping a scope in a dead player's inventory like JohnnyBadNews, and the reticle won't just display the color and icon of the item, but the character will call out that specific scope. Your character will spit out a different voice line if you ping an opened loot container than if you ping a closed one, and all eight characters have lines for every item and weapon. You can even ping pings to acknowledge them. If you ping a pinged ping—well, may God have mercy on your soul.
Pinging's darkest magick is its ability to make playing with strangers as worthwhile as playing with friends. My first few wins came from playing with calm, quiet enigmas who coordinated movement, called out enemy locations, and shared loot without speaking or typing anything at all. This itself is a boon to accessibility and a salve to toxicity, but atop it, Apex features a text-to-speech comms option for players with difficulty speaking or worried about harassment, which unfortunately feels like a revolutionary act when huge multiplayer games like Anthem and Fallout 76 release without text chat at all.
To go from being routinely debased by legions of preteen racists in Fortnite to notching wins with strangers in utter silence in Apex Legends is a videogame miracle.
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