At a recent preview event, Epic Games Vice President of Publishing Mike Fischer was up front about the long, quiet wait gamers have endured since Fortnite was first announced back in December of 2011. “The fact of the matter is, we announced this game too soon," he said. "What I can tell you is this game has been in development for a long time for very good reasons."

Those reasons include an upgrade from Unreal Engine 3 to the more powerful Unreal Engine 4 and an increase in overall size and ambition. "The scope and scale of the game has increased from a game jam concept to a rich, full fledged world," Fischer said.

We saw only a small slice of that scope and scale during a recent hour-long hands-on demo of the game, but what we did see came across as a lot of intriguing and highly disparate game elements that don't yet quite gel together into more than the sum of their parts.

My life as a scavenger

The first phase of the game is primarily about scrounging for materials. Three teammates and I ran around a cartoon-styled, abandoned suburban environment, bashing everything from trees and rocks to old cars and refrigerators to collect their raw component materials. There were some zombies around during this phase, but they were more a nuisance than an existential threat, sneaking in and taking a few bites out of us as we'd chip away for bits of wood and spare parts.

Those materials could be crafted, Minecraft-style, into the tools and resources we would need to protect ourselves from an onslaught of undead minions to come later. The crafted items included the usual collection of guns, bullets, melee weapons, and health potions, but also barriers made of wood, brick, or metal that will slow the undead's approach (plus some items like pickaxes that make further resource collection easier). You can also make traps that can be placed on barriers, Orcs Must Die-style, to damage zombies automatically as they pass by.

While you're amassing these resources, you and your team are also looking for the portal that will be the ultimate target for the zombie hordes. Hunting down that portal was a bit of a slog in our demo, requiring a careful scouring of every nook and cranny of the environment. The whole searching process felt like it took a bit too long, especially while the team's focus was already split with collecting resources.

There's nothing stopping you from bleeding the entire map dry of resources and building the most elaborate defensive maze ever constructed, but there are bonuses for efficiency as far as time and resource use are concerned. Plus, to be honest, I found simply scrounging for resources a little boring after a while. I understand how picking up these materials myself makes them feel all the more precious, but I wouldn't mind if this entire phase ended up a little zippier.

Keeping them out (and trapping us in)

In any case, once the portal is found, it's time to set up a defensive maze of the type that should be familiar to anyone who has ever played a tower defense game. Doing this from an on-the-ground, over-the-shoulder third-person perspective is a bit cumbersome, but Epic's interface tries to make it as manageable as possible to snap walls, ceilings, stairways, and traps into position using the mouse and keyboard. I especially liked being able to easily carve out doors and windows into walls to make for easy navigation or sniping positions, respectively.

When your defenses are set, it's time to unleash the zombies who will try to throw themselves at the portal before it can be closed. Keeping them away means fighting them directly with those melee weapons and guns, but you likely won't have enough ammo or health to just kill them all directly, Gears of War horde mode-style. Instead, your base has to do its job slowing them down and directing them toward the traps that will do most of the damage. That means you have to find some time amid the chaos to repair your fort's walls as they take on damage from the encroaching horde.

If it sounds like Fortnite has a lot of stuff to keep track of, that's because it does. The developers watching over our shoulders did their best to guide us through the resource gathering, building, attacking, and repairing as needed, but I felt constantly overwhelmed by the amount and variety of things I was being asked to do.

What's more, defending a base from a third-person perspective presented its own problems. The build we played had a mini-map showing where enemy zombies were at the moment in relation to the portal, but that map didn't show the walls of the base itself or which of those walls was in most need of repairs. As a result, I spent a lot of time lost in my own maze, trying to figure out how best to get to a group of zombies or a weak piece of real estate.

Much of the time, it felt like the byzantine walls we had set up to keep the zombies out were doing just as good a job keeping us in, and they often prevented us from effectively taking an active part in the defense. Those doors and windows helped a bit, but the best bet was actually climbing up to high ground atop the ceilings and simply looking out at the surroundings rather than relying on the map.

These issues may not be as significant as the game makes its way to a final launch. Everything would probably be more manageable if I had learned it slowly from the beginning rather than just getting thrown into a small slice at a preview event with little knowledge of how to most effectively build and manage a base. Still, Fortnite currently feels like a lot of game design tropes thrown together into a big mishmash of genres that doesn't quite gel into a satisfying whole.

Fortnite is due to hit Windows PCs and Macs in 2015.