Picture this.. You’re one of the only two people alive out of the original 100, your heart is beating at a zillion miles an hour. 15 mates crowd in around you. You then hit an impossible sniper shot to win the game and the room erupts in cheers and yelling. You get an earful from the Dean of your college afterwards for making too much noise, but you don’t care, you’ve won your first game.
It’s not Call of Duty, its not Far Cry, it’s Fortnite.. The survival game which, if you’re a gamer, is most likely dominating your time at the moment.
Epic Games’ arguably most successful title revolves around an extinction event which leaves Earth’s population desolated, and zombie-esque creatures killing the remaining survivors. But that’s not the game mode that’s driving parents and partners mad right now..
The most popular game mode that Fortnite offers is the ‘Battle Royale’. The game starts off on a ‘battle bus’ which flies over a large island. Players skydive out of the bus onto the ground, and after that it turns into a 100 man free for all. Kill or be killed.
On top of this, there’s a ‘Storm’ which closes in the map to force you closer to other players. If you’re outside the storm’s perimeter, you lose health! This adds another huge strategic factor to the already jam packed game.
You find weapons, build towers and if you’re the last man standing, get probably one of the best rushes that a game can offer. Sometimes, of course, it can end in heartbreak. You put in a whole game’s worth of solid work only to get blown to smithereens with a rocket launcher by a bloke who then proceeds to dance in celebration of their win.. There’s not much worse than that feeling. But that only fires you up to win the next one, or go and cry yourself to sleep.. One of the two.
The other dimension Fortnite brings to the table is its social appeal, which is fairly unprecedented in a lot of ways. I’ve never been so happy to just watch someone else play. At my college you rarely see a day go by without a Fortnite session in someone’s room. Whether you’re playing at the time or not, you chat, you laugh, you give your mates crap when they lose, you just have a great old time. It truly is a game that most people will be able to like and have fun playing, and that’s why it’s so popular at the moment.
There’s so much more than I’ve mentioned, but I hope this little rundown has provided a little bit of education if you weren’t sure what the game was or how it worked. Be careful if you want to start playing, because you might not stop..
