Apex Legends is a game about dying. Mathematically speaking, it's the outcome of roughly ninety-six percent of the matches I've played. Those exceptions, where I'm proclaimed champion and survive a 60 person battle royale, are as fleeting as they are perfect.
Even the best players falter. No one is invincible.
If were to hazard a guess, I've spent at least 1000 hours playing this game. That perfect winning feeling still feels worthy of pursuit 5 3-month-long seasons in. More than any other battle royale game I've played, Apex Legends is full of quiet time :lengthy periods of relative calm that punctuate the bangs, booms, and zips. These moments are where I've come to appreciate the various systems and the two beautiful but dangerous worlds I've inhabited for up to 20 minutes at a time.
The ability to ping your enemies and items of interest, and respawn your teammates may have been co-opted by other games, but they're still most intuitively managed in Apex. Fortnite's respawn trucks lower the stakes with multiple uses, Call of Duty's gulag is a little too bleak for someone who still occassionally dreams of a glorious socialist future where we live in peace and with dignity. There's nothing that Apex can really claim as its own anymore, but it's still the best game about killing upwards of 50 people at a time.
Apex can't even claim to have the most diverse range of characters, though the representation achieved through its small cast is worth celebrating. It is not unusual to start a match with a squad of 3 women. 2 of the characters are canonincally queer. While this is fundamentally a game about shooting people with your bullet guns, it's not just humorless white dudes (or even dudes, for that matter) exchanging fire. Does face-level diversity mean a great deal when you're still getting called homophobic and/or misogynistic slurs when you make a mistake? Probably not the place for me, a cis, straight, white man to make comment, but I've seen a few streamers and content creators who fall outside of that race and gender grouping talk about how much it means to them. Maybe that's enough.
A diverse roster is great, but it doesn't count for much if the core game it's wrapped around doesn't work. I's just as well that, in my opinion, no other multiplayer shooter works better. There is a sense of joy to movement that still hits when I'm sliding down mountainous terrain at great speed, zipping from riverbed to mountain heights, and scaling up buildings for the six thousandth time. There is nowhere that can't be reached. Watching the best players is like watching skilled drivers on a track that keeps warping to different shapes and sizes. Unless you're sniping, movement incurs no penalty to aim, so encounters always feel different. I may have died to the R-99 submachine gun a thousand times, but each time that sense of disappointment felt as though it set in in a different way. As the map shrinks and positioning becomes paramount, some wins feel effortless and others meticulously planned and executed. Each of the 250ish wins I've achieved have occured in different circumstances, in different parts of the maps. The same can be said for roughly 6000 losses.
I understand that battle royales are not for everyone, and Apex Legends will be for even fewer people. While there are characters who spew punchlines while downing enemies, this is a game about shooting as many people as you can, as fast as you can without dying yourself. Some achieve that sense of relief through much lighter (as in, nonviolent) subject matter: that's good too. All I know is that I have to stop myself from playing game. This review is over a year in the making because every time I sit down to write it, I am overcome by the urge to play another match.
Is the fact that I've finally committeed this to the web evidence of the spell breaking? I would argue not, as coronavirus-mandated isolation has only allowed me to play more without the ability to engage in other social interactions. When I get to see my family again, the balance will change. I want the balance to change. But for now, I hope you'll consider being jumpmaster with me for a few matches.
