Any season that actively makes competitive players pissy and angry while giving casual players new toys and tools to work with is a good season in my book.

I'm wary of how things will play out since it's still early for the season (I'm wanting to do logs for the start and end of seasons since I think it's worthwhile looking at how stuff changes and my thoughts over time), and I really hope that Epic at least partially ignores the "pro players" in favor of the overwhelming majority who play the game for casual fun; the vehicle meta is a very different change of pace that has brought much needed variety to how matches generally play out. I do think the vehicles are a bit overly spongy on health, to the point that you're basically guaranteed a death sentence if you don't have one by endgame or yours blows up, but I really hope Epic's solution to that isn't just nerfing vehicles and instead giving on-foot players more weapons and tools to deal with them instead. Like, it's pretty surprising the rocket launcher wasn't unvaulted for this season? The explosive crossbow is okay but it doesn't drop as frequently as it really should to be a proper solution.

This is the season that has finally made the Chapter 5 map worthwhile. I love the new overhauled bottom portion of the map with all the different ways you can not just traverse it, but going fast while doing so. The Nitrodome is maybe the worst boss location, but I also wonder if that's more just to do with early season excitement and everybody wanting to land there like most seasons tend to have. XP speeds have significantly been bumped up compared to last season but I wonder if that's more to do with Epic just further giving up on any story at all at this point; the only sources of XP you're getting are from the thankfully improved dailies (you don't have to random chance it from the list, you're given three quests you can tackle on any match in any order), weeklies, and Creative/Festival/Racing/LEGO. I can't really complain though when we're barely through week one and I'm already at level 20 compared to last season when I had barely gotten through level 100 by the very end.

We'll see where things end up by the end of the season and also what the metaverse modes will have to offer as they update in the middle of the season, but the core Battle Royale mode itself is finally interesting in a unique way again that I hope Epic sticks to their guns on.

Splatoon must be the best game ever made, the way that Nintendo has re-released it three times in less than a decade.

As with Splatoon 2, the only serious new draw to this entry is the DLC, at which point you'll have spent full price + DLC price for one pretty interesting campaign that clocks in at less than half the runtime of any other full price video game.

Maybe we can just skip the DLC and actually get a good campaign to ship WITH the game next time, guys.