I’ve played a lot of BR games: PUBG, Fortnite, Realm Royale, Battlerite Royale, Blackout, and now Apex Legends.
This is my opinion on Apex Legends: Respawn took all of the best and most innovative game mechanics from other Battle Royale games, and smushed them into one cohesive game.
EDIT: I think it’s pretty clear that this game also feels a lot like Titanfall 2, since it’s developped in the same engine by the same team, but I’m going to focus instead on the game’s influences from its peers in the BR genre.
I think it’s interesting just to take a look at the variety of influences Respawn considered when developing Apex:
- Black Ops IV — Enemies drop similar looking loot-boxes, and the looting interface feels very similar.
- Battlerite Royale — Resurrection points (you can resurrect dead teammates [provided you take their banner from their corpse] from any of the green map markers), Armor rarity (white→orange), High-loot zones, class-based with cooldowns, and boost locations (in Apex they’re balloons).
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds — technique for diving [the optimal way in both PUBG and Apex is called ‘wave dropping’ and involves intermittently diving to gain speed, then flattening out to get the most distance, repeatedly.
- Realm Royale — lack of parachute, class-based, abilities with cooldowns.
- Fortnite — Game’s pace and speed, the strength of close-range weapons, weapon rarity.
And I have to tell you, they did a hell of a job making this mutant of a AAA Battle Royale title into a masterpiece.
You don’t have to sit and watch the whole game from your squadmate’s POV if you die early since there’s a possibility for resurrection.
You can even get back into a game within 10 seconds once you do lose. It feels to me like this game has some serious potential, in terms of entertainment value from streamers playing, and in terms of eSports.