What a funny little maelstrom of emotions last night’s surprise release of Apex Legends kicked off. Elation! There’s a new Respawn game, and it’s playable right now! Dejection! It’s a free-to-play battle royale hero shooter? Now there’s a messy melange of concepts, as if someone in some boardroom somewhere spewed up buzzwords and handed them over as a design doc.
Then there’s the excitement! It looks kind of amazing, perhaps the prettiest battle royale game to date, and if there is a hint of knock-off, anonymous MOBA to its art-style (and to its name, which sounds like a credit card and brings to mind such exciting notions as annual percentage rates and variable interest rates), it’s an improvement on the slight murkiness of Titanfall and its sequel. There’s colour and vibrancy here, coupled handsomely with Respawn’s technical nous.
And here comes the disappointment! This isn’t Titanfall 3! And it’s not even an offshoot while we wait for the real thing: Apex Legends, it seems, is the only Titanfall-flavoured experience we’ll be seeing out of Respawn for some time.
