Epic’s Fortnite bares so many influences it’s hard to know where to start describing it. It has the cartoon visuals of Team Fortress 2 and the apocalyptic resource scarcity of State of Decay. It combines Minecraft’s open world construction with Far Cry’s emphasis on player ingenuity over scripted solutions. It marries the cooperative combat and RPG advancement of DOTA to the pick-up and play appeal of Left 4 Dead. In short, it’s a total departure from the studio’s most recent success with Gears of War. Trying to cram all that into a single game is a tall order but my most recent hands-on session with the game’s cooperative multiplayer modes has me anxious to play more.

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At the start of each match, players choose from one of three characters – the Constructor, who excels at making buildings; the Commando, who is tough and great at ranged combat; or the Ninja, who has lots of mobility and melee skills. There will be other characters in the game at launch, and more added as time goes on, but those are the three available currently. Each class can engage in all the key game systems in Fortnite, but you’ll have an extra edge in the particular specialty of your class. As you play, you earn experience you can use to upgrade the class you’ve been playing. You might get a better jump for your Ninja, or grenades for your Commando.You enter the world armed only with the proverbial board with a nail in it. Using that, you have to harvest the trees and trucks and rocks and radio towers around the environment to get the materials you need to build better tools, weapons and ammo, and traps you’ll need to survive. Each item degrades through use, so even if you get a schematic that lets you build a cool rocket-powered sledgehammer or a laser rifle, you’ll still need to stay on top of the harvesting and gradually earn your right to create and use that weapon. There are no level restrictions on the schematics you can earn or the items you can build, but most of the higher tier stuff requires a sort of crafting chain that means you have to collect and construct a handful of prerequisites before you get the really cool stuff. Happily, the schematics you do earn persist from session to session, so, over time, you'll amass a list of favorites you can use again and again.As you go through the world demolishing gas stations, boulders, and pretty much anything that gets in your way, you’ll also be exploring and finding hidden treasure chests that contain their own resources, tools, and schematics. Sometimes these are hidden on rooftops of cliffs, but other times they’re hidden behind fake walls deep in basements of houses and factories. A good rule of thumb is to demolish as much as possible to get all the raw materials you’ll need to survive. While you’ll need most of the nuts and bolts and bits of resin to craft the tools you’ll need in the world, you’ll also need to make sure you collect loads and loads of wood, stone, and metal to create the actual buildings in the world.The building elements are all remarkably easy to use. You simply select a general piece – say a floor (which also doubles as a ceiling), a stairway, or a wall. From there, you simply select a material, then lay the piece down in the world. Though the piece takes a few seconds to fill in, it immediately has all the physical properties you need to walk on it or use it as a connector for another piece. With just a few minutes of practice, I was laying in walls, editing them for windows or doors, and building staircases that switched back and forth. If a particular wall needs reinforcements, you can even spend a few extra resources to make it a bit tougher.While the building is fun – the game will have a creative mode just for those of us who want to dig into this aspect – there’s a larger, more practical reason you’re gathering this stuff. Rather than the narrow, scripted challenges of Gears, Fortnite presents players with unique enemy types and a handful of general objectives, and then the game’s designers get out of the way so that players can find their own solutions to the problems at hand. One mission might have you racing against a clock to fortify a position before the zombie-like horde of Husks attack. Another mission might have you escorting a robot while protecting it from Husk attacks. Still another might have you shutting down a gate that’s allowing Husk through to your world. There’s bound to be a story here somewhere, but I really couldn’t care less about it; everything is just so apparent in the mission design that it’s not really important who the Husk are or why they’re after me. I just know I want to kill them before they kill me and my team.The enemies in the game fit the general proportions of a game like Left 4 Dead; you’ve got a bunch of rank-and-file scrubs who are there to soak up your bullets, and the occasional appearance of a more specialized enemy. The Flinger, for example, tosses other enemies up over your fortifications, which requires specialized tactics. Another enemy has a beehive mounted on his head, which means he’s best taken out at a distance. Tough melee fighters, ranged attackers, and the like ensure that each combat requires you to balance several different strategies based on the class you're playing.After running me through a lengthy session of cooperative multiplayer, the team at Epic discussed several plans for the larger metagame. Each of the missions on the cooperative multiplayer maps are selected from a gradually expanding map of zones. The zones you pick determine the type of terrain you’ll encounter – forests, suburb, industrial, etc. – and owning that zone will contribute some sort of persistent benefit to your team. Take control of an industrial sector, for instance, and you might bring additional fuel resources into subsequent zones.There’s also a persistent base element in the mix somewhere. You’ll be able to build additional structures here to benefit you as well. An armory, for example, might give your team extra guns at the start of a level, while a Dojo could increase the power of your Ninjas. As you level up each of the character types, you might be able to install them at your base for an added benefit. A lot of these details haven’t yet found their way into the game yet, so it’s all subject to change, but the potential is there for Fortnite to add an extra bit of context to all the fun you have in the otherwise one-off missions. And while the team isn't quite ready to talk about the competitive multiplayer experience, it’s easy to see how the harvesting, construction, and combat mechanics could easily be adapted.Currently, Fortnite is only planned for the PC but, given the success of other open-world games on the consoles, it wouldn't surprise me to see the game make its way to one or more of the big three systems. Epic’s made a big point of wanting this game to reach as wide an audience as possible, which makes sense given the game’s free-to-play model. While the team offered the usual assurances that Fortnite won’t be “pay to win,” I was encouraged to hear that the revenue model won’t include weapon rentals or a general sale of power.I’m impressed Epic’s been able to push out into an area that’s so far removed from its most recent successes. With the tremendous momentum and experience built through Gears of War, taking a chance on a title like Fortnite is a bit of a risky move. Based solely on the cooperative multiplayer missions I played, it seems like a risk that will pay off. The big unknowns, of course, are the persistent element, the competitive play, and whether or not the revenue model is as trouble-free as the team suggests.The game is currently scheduled for alpha release sometime this year. We’ll be sure to bring you more updates on this as the year goes on.

Steve Butts is Editor-in-Chief at IGN and learned about fortnights from D&D. Follow him on Twitter