After playing the season preceding this, everything here was like a breath of fresh air. I liked the smaller map and the locations it brought us. The Oathbound weapons were pretty fun and I especially loved using the Shockwave Hammer, even if it was too easy to get early kills with. Augments were absolutely a welcome addition. The unique modifiers can be selected at random to accommodate for your own play style, and it makes battle royale feel less stagnant. I've got mixed feelings on the quests though; most of them varied from being good to just ok, but the Oathbound and Find it in Fortnite quests were sleepers. Nothing but walking around half the goddamn map and playing boring Roblox-tier games. Overall it's not a bad season. If they had crossed over with a better anime instead of Mid Hero Macadamia, I would have been generous and gave it 4 stars but we can't have nice things.

probably the most consistently fun multiplayer game in years, and im glad internet society at large has stopped pretending fortnite isnt fun as fuck. granted im saying this as someone who has played... uhh... 548 hours on and off since release? (probably a bad thing)

in a world where every multiplayer game is trying to be HyperCompetitive Metagaming Play 18 Hours A Day to Keep Up With Being Good Enough To Queue For A Game, fortnite sections off its playstyles well enough that a guy like me who just wants to have fun can actually just do that. nobuild continues to be The Way To Play this game, in case you were unaware and queued into the normal mode which is pretty much overrun by sweats lol

this season particularly is great, augments are among the best additions in quite some time, and it finally gives me something good to use gold for lmao. hammers were great too, for the time they were in at least. only iffy additions i think are the Anime Items which were insanely overpowered at one point but i think complaining about that is like complaining about items in mario kart, like come on! its stupid but its fun!

also balancing seemed like much more of an issue for them this time than the last time i remember really playing this game, but i dont know if thats just because i was playing enough to be aware when they vaulted the hammer for like the third time lol. it was still pretty fun though, even when you lose to something stupid its not that hard to laugh it off due to how unserious the whole atmosphere around this game is.

but yeah? tldr? fortnite is fun? and good? excited for the next season

continues to copy respawn's homework and is better for it. after stealing most every movement mechanic from apex (aside from the broken stuff like wallbounces) they've moved onto swiping evo shields (evocrhome is technically last season) and supply bots. i do appreciate that every big update to fortnite keeps adding to the movement systems to the point where you can basically just consider it an arena shooter with one really big map. every change is well considered but the whole experience (at least in terms of gameplay) is just slightly too polished off to give us some really good exploits that really bust the whole thing wide open. there are enough systems at play on their own and getting around is smooth enough that i'm never truly bored in the transit times but the best Gaming Locomotion is always unintended by the developers.
they tightened up the graphics on level three. i didn't think it would be that noticeable but i moved from pc to console just to get all the fancy new bells and whistles. it is really really nice to look at. i truly loathe temporal artifacting, every time i see ghosting outlines of my character or the level geometry i feel like someone is dragging my brain across pavement. but there's something incredibly charming about the artifacts coming out of these early ray tracing engines. it feels so raw and grainy and weirdly analog. like you're seeing every little photon of light dotting your character whenever you're under the shadow of a tree. i imagine how i feel about this is similar to how most people get nostalgic for affine texture warping in old ps1 games. it's more genuine then temporal ghosting in my eyes. i think this is gamer brain damage really kicking in at age 26.

man. i'm not sure what changed but compared to the previous chapter/season i'm finding it a lot harder to do well at this game. i consistently lose faceoffs i should not be losing (when i see my opponent's remaining health/shields and their weapon/quality versus what i was using and had aimed directly at their face). the map is a lot more basic and boring than chapter 3's was (at least near its end, when i started playing). i like maybe 3 of the new guns. the giant hammer is fun, but it disrupts things so much that it changes the game perhaps a bit too radically. the worst, maybe, is that i'm also playing against console users who get aim assist, which i can only assume is the busted-ass deciding factor in most of my losses. it feels like an "anyone can win" game for babies, now, and i don't understand how streamers who play this and win consistently do it. i dunno. hopefully it recovers, because i don't think i'd have gotten so excited if this is where i had jumped in.

I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I was totally enamored with this season in the beginning. I absolutely adored what felt like everything about it for the first month or two, but the last month or so I was running into extremely severe server lag. I play on a PS5 with a solid Internet connection, so I had no clue where this was coming from. Had asked some friends if they were experiencing it too, and many of them were running into it as well. Mind you, it wasn’t a one-time thing, I was running into said lag fairly regularly (with some stabilization at either very late or very early hours).

Aside from that, kind of reflecting on the season as a whole, I just wasn’t invested in the story, or characters, maps, mechanics, etc like I was in seasons prior. I really love the RPG feel of augments, and I love the graphics and battlepass updates, but that’s… kind of it? Once the luster of it all wears off, you realize there’s not much substance there to sustain player engagement. Overall I did get some enjoyment out of it, but it was rather disappointing by the end.

I left a positive review for this chapter before but after realizing they have changed weekly quests to be time limited instead of lasting through the entire season, I'm giving this a low score. One of the things I enjoyed most about Fortnite was that the season long weekly quests made it easier to enjoy the game and complete the battle pass at my own pace. This season's weekly quests are time limited and incredibly grindy. If this change persists next season, then I'll probably drop Fortnite until it's reverted.

kamehameha and deku smash being in the map at the same time is the most insanely fun thing ever idec that i never got a dub (lost my final match in #2 to a john wick fuuu) but i genuinely love almost every weapon. keyword almost, burst rifle is ass. epic is obv having a really hard time with ue5 conversion cause they keep removing shit because it bugs everything. augments are still really fun, just wish id stop getting bow ones. i got the president helsie skin which is the one i really wanted so I'm considering that my finish line.

It's always hard to "review" a game where the majority of my enjoyment comes from the fun I have with friends.

That being said, man I had a lot of fun with friends during this season! The gravity hammer was awesome. I think my favorite part of the season was when both the Kamehameha and Deku Smash were on the map at the same time. Just pure chaos and I loved it.

Otherwise, the map refresh was great and the graphical update was incredibly impressive. Fortnite finally looked cutting edge and that made the experience feel more premium than it did before in my eyes.

I fully completed the Battlepass this season as well but I definitely felt less motivation to do so since the final skin is just not as interesting as last season's Spider-Gwen. Another thing I did not like were the heat ratings. God I hated that week period where NPCs were just constantly aggro.

Fortnite continues to be a really fun game that I love to play with friends. It's not perfect but I have a great time almost every session. It's also the only multiplayer shooter I'm playing that has incredible implementation of Gyro controls on PS5!!! That alone just makes it feel incredible to play.

Anyways, I think I ran out of things to say but yeah, Fortnite good.