Apex Legends

When I heard rumours of a Titanfall ‘Battle Royale’ game I thought they were just a joke. But when Apex Legends was officially revealed, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. If you’ve followed my blog you’ll know I was a big fan of the original Titanfall and its sequel – despite my criticisms of the design direction of the TF2 MP.

The more I thought about a Titanfall BR game the more excited I became. I’ve not played any Battle Royale games – it’s just not a genre I’m particularly interested in. But a Titanfall BR? A BR game with Titanfall movement mechanics, on a map facilitating those mechanics with the addition of Titan combat?

Oh shit, that actually sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? You take the fantastic fluid movement of Titanfall, the cool Titanfall world, and then add Titan combat into the mix – maybe as an unlock for a set number of kills, or perhaps when a certain number of players remain, everyone can call down a Titan and duke it out to win. You could choose to fight in your Titan, or perhaps let it go auto as pilot bait.

The thought of all this got me quite excited about playing a BR game. I loved playing Titanfall and though this isn’t exactly a Titanfall 3, the chance of returning to that world and that unique blend of pilot/titan combat was an exciting prospect. That excitement was, unfortunately, short lived.

Because Apex Legends doesn’t have jet packs or wall running or even bloody titans. It has none of the unique movement mechanics that made Titanfall such a joy to play. From an interview with Eurogamer -

‘The choice to not have those came about because of play-testing against our goals: to have a strategic, learnable, masterable, deep game.’

‘[We had] things like wall running and double jumping for a long time, we had triple jump for a while, they make combat really hard to beat and comprehend. You can’t predict where players come from or you’re pushing them to, and things would happen to you more than you would predict and respond against. So it’s really fun to do, but it’s really bad for combat legibility.’

To be honest, after seeing the design direction of TF2, this attitude shouldn’t exactly surprise me, but I’m still disappointed. They’ve essentially ripped out everything that made Titanfall unique, special and great fun to play. They may stress that Apex Legends isn’t a Titanfall game – hence the name – but it is set within the same world and uses many of the weapon and environmental assets of the Titanfall series.

I wouldn’t be so bothered by this if A) we still knew a Titanfall 3 was in development – but it appears that whatever Titanfall 3 was going to be was then transformed into Apex Legends and B) if I hadn’t thought about how cool an actual Titanfall BR game would be, incorporating the pilot/titan combat of the series with the excellent map design of TF1.

For a few short hours, I was pretty excited about playing that game. But that’s not what Apex Legends is. And I’m not saying that Apex Legends is necessarily a bad game because of that – it’s just not the game that I wanted, that I imagined when I pictured a BG game set within the Titanfall world.

I’m also not a fan of the character designs which look totally out of place in the Titanfall universe. They look more like low budget Overwatch heroes. I did download Apex Legends to give it a shot, to see if it could win me over, but after playing the tutorial I just didn’t want to continue.

The running and sliding felt so good and immediately familiar. And even though I knew I couldn’t wall run, I instinctively had to try. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I had to see it to believe it. It just made me sad, and I just didn’t feel like jumping into a match to play this weird looking, bastardised version of a game series I once loved. Maybe in the future I’ll be willing to give it a fair shake. But not today.