Fortnite: Is it worth it?
(If this is a clumsy review it's because I just woke up and it's been over a year since I've done one.)
We took a break from playing Overwatch ("break" meaning we put it down for maybe a day and then split our time between OW and Fortnite) to pick up Fortnite. We bought the standard $40 digital edition, no extra bells and whistle, on Xbox.
If you haven't played it yet, Fortnite is an online co-op, sandbox survival game developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games. You select a hero from one of four classes: Soldier, Outlander, Ninja and Constructor, and use that hero to defend or complete an objective while fighting off waves of zombies. Each one has pros and cons and can be upgraded, collected, retired, etc. There are also defenders, survivors, squads, llamas, and so much more in this game. I'm level 16 or 17 and I have a hard time keeping up with everything I need to do between rounds.
I personally play an Outlander because I love to resource gather and explore the map. I also tend to build in our group because my two to three other teammates generally play Ninja, Outlander and Soldier. I've evolved my Outlander to level two so he's stronger and can resource gather faster. My backpack is upgraded to size 75 and it's still not nearly enough to hold everything I want to hold. We're heading into the Tier 2 of the Skill Tree, so hopefully that reconciles the issue, but there's so much to gather and craft, I just don't have the room even at 75. (It doesn't help that I end up with 5 stacks of planks and forget to drop them, whoops.)
My major complaint a couple days ago would have been about the crashing. They put an update through two days ago that seemed to fix the issue, but every hour or so it would crash right after the end of a round and I wouldn't get all my goodies that I'd earned. I have a couple minor things to address also.
Directly behind the crashing, the loadtimes can be horrendous. Maybe it's just Xbox, but it takes forever to load in. I understand that it's a beta, but I feel like this needs to be addressed soon because it feels like 2011 Skyrim all over again. Also, there are framerate drops if there's too much on the screen at one time, which leads me to believe they just need to compress some of their files. It doesn't make the game crash, but we're going to be testing 4 loot llamas at one time to see if it'll crash simply because we can.
Also, it's a beta that I had to pay to get into. Most of the time for closed betas you're looking at it being a preorder incentive(Destiny, Call of Duty, etc), but this feels just like a kickstarter with a different style.
Even with these complaints, I love this game. I really, really love it. It's so much fun to play with friends and there's so much to do that it can almost be overwhelming at first. I really think it's worth it to purchase, even if it's just a beta. I know I just complained about it being a paid beta, but in the long run if the money they're getting helps to improve and expand the game, take my money. I spend so much time running around in game just mining resources and looking for chests that it makes up for any of the flaws I see. And, for a beta, there's so much to do. It doesn't seem like we're going to be running into an end anytime soon.
Overall, yes I think Fortnite is worth it.
