"Fun, But Needs Some Change"

I won't lie when I say that the first few weeks of this season were amazing, possibly some of the best gameplay "Fortnite" had ever had at one point. The new goo mechanic being added was interesting, the points of interest got a much-needed remix, snipers were added back into the game, and the birthday event got started with all of its bouncy, goofy music blasting glory. And then the rest of the season slowly trickled on up to a point where I just took a month off of playing the game. What happened with this final chapter?

The Chrome mechanic was very interesting as it added a few different movement techniques and gave the ability to heal passively. However, I found it to be problematic. The wall-shift ability was clunky and always triggered when you moved into any surface with chrome, which really threw off stealthy plays and whatnot. Additionally, the ability to turn into a blob felt more irritating than fun to interact with since this season had way too much burst movement tech, leading to wild fights that felt random and chaotic as all hell. Combat thus felt like it gained equal parts skill and complete luck, and therefore winning felt less sweet than usual throughout the season.

Snipers came back and were balanced horribly. While I can support a one-shot sniper at times, the bolt-action plagued this season (even though I was generally the one dealing the most damage to others). It never feels fun to have smart tactics or movement punished by a lucky shot, and "Fortnite" has never been a game with superb hitboxes/hit registration.

The events were super weak as well - I was really looking forward to "Fortnightmares 2022", and it was pretty much just a minor decoration of the map while Epic tried to peddle numerous skins. I picked up a treat for myself (the Alien skin), but I thought there would be something more gloomy, interactive, and fun to celebrate the holiday.

I really felt mixed with the whole "floating building" trend that populated the map as well. It made the game feel like it was less grounded than ever before, for better AND worse. Verticality became a viable tactic once again, except it was VITAL to have high ground in order to win any game. The zone itself felt more useless than ever before, and the still high loot density/quality made that aspect of the game forgettable. Having a "Rocket League" mini event was fun but didn't really affect much gameplay wise.

I did like some of the new content like the Port-A-Bunker and evolving weaponry, and the return of snipers and more varied wildlife was cool, but there was so much removed in place of this that after a while, it all got pretty stale. The incentives were also very poor with the worst Battle Pass I've seen since coming back to "Fortnite" this year, and I truly think that none of the skins stood out for me.

I skipped out on the season ending event, and with good reason - the game got boring. It was functionally fun enough to play for a while, but then new ideas just stopped releasing while the existing ones showcased a much smaller sense of depth than previous seasons. This likely was due to the impending release of Chapter 4 and all of its crazy additions to the game, which is acceptable, but I expected more out of Epic to put a nice cherry on top of what was undoubtably the most important year of "Fortnite" to date.

Final Verdict: 7/10 (Good)

Unfortunately because of Finals I did not have much time to play this season and I unfortunately missed most of the skins part of the battle pass except the Paradigm

From what I did play though:

-New weapon additions were really diverse and offered more variety than the previous season
-The Chrome was an interesting addition and made for different combat options that made traversal easier
-Battle Pass was overall really good even if I did not complete it
-The new additions to the map were nice

Besides that I played the Event and I was kind of underwhelmed because it felt like it was perfunctorily trying to wrap up everything in the chapter in kind of a rushed way which left a lot of potholes in the story and I also thought the event was really simple and not in a good way.

Also no Black Panther skins, really?

Overall not a bad season just didn’t play much of it because of outside circumstances.

retroactively reviewing previous seasons post c5s1.

yeah the chrome was kinda bad looking, but I really enjoyed this season overall. I really enjoyed the chrome goop movement mechanic, the evochrome weapons were some of the funnest in the game. battle pass rewards include some really great outfits including: Meow Skulls, Lennox Rose, Twyn, and Spider-Gwen.

Also this year's Fortnightmares was specifically made for me. A fem werewolf DJ blasting hard techno that turns you into a techno-werewolf. Hell Yeah dude. (BTW listen to Sara Landry, the DJ who mixed DJ Lyka's mix)

Anyhow, a great season to end a decent chapter.

I was pretty hyped for this season after falling deep into the Fortnite hole in Ch3 Sn3 and loving Zero Build and the collabs (especially Dragon Ball!).

For this season, I loved the chrome mechanic and the vibe of the Nothing, and Spider-Gwen in the BP was a huge plus for me. Unfortunately, the ending was lackluster and the story and quests weren't as engaging as I hoped. All the threads kind of fell flat by the end of the season.

It feels weird to talk about story/quests in a game that most people just want to get that #1 Victory Royale, or whatever, but that's what I come to Fortnite for: fun gameplay, goofiness and quests. Unfortunately, this season felt like a step back in that regard.