Fortnite comes very close to standing out from the crowded online-shooter fray. Some video games let you hunker down with friends and shoot a zillion oncoming zombies. Other games let you build a giant, personalized fortress. What if a single game let you do both—and made the fort-building stuff a cinch? (Basically, a particularly smooth gaming combo of peanut butter and chocolate.)

To test that attractive sales pitch, I have racked up about a week of on-and-off Fortnite testing, spread over the two weeks since the game launched in a peculiar "paid early access" manner. With that much time, I've confirmed that Fortnite includes a darned good synergy of those game ideas, backed by robust game mechanics, incredible art design, and a base-building system that really finds a good balance between simplicity and depth.

Trouble is, I've also struggled to have fun with the results thus far. While Epic has declared that this is an "early access" game for the foreseeable future, whose elements are subject to change, I'm concerned that Fortnite's root issue can't be so easily patched: the poisonous real-money economics stirred into the gameplay pot.

So much that could have gone right

Fortnite imagines an America overrun by zomb—er, pardon, "husks." (They look remarkably like the undead half of the Plants Vs. Zombies series.) Your job is to head into the dangerous world and complete missions that, for the plot's sake, wipe out giant, purple-poison rain clouds in the sky. (Forget that weak acid rain from the '80s; husk rain is the new hotness!)



















Epic Games



The game begins with a ramp-up, tutorial-like series of about six missions. These introduce players to the game's basic crux: land in a mission; find the key point on your mission's map (always procedurally generated, by the way) that needs to be protected; build a combination of barriers, traps, and fort-like structures around that point to protect it; and turn on a cloud-destroying device. Doing that (or an equivalent task for your given mission) gets the husks' attention, so you and up to three squadmates have to hunker down for 3-12 minutes and fend off however many zombies come. Sometimes, you'll get one long wave of husks; other times, you get a few short ones, between which your team gets about one minute to repair and fortify your base.

The first clever thing Fortnite gets right is base building, which is boiled down to a few basic structure types: walls, floors, ramps, and roofs. Pick one of those four, then tap a button to edit the default template, which appears as either four or nine blocks on a single 2D square grid. For example: leave the template untouched to make a full wall. Or, you can create a waist-high barrier (leave only the bottom three blocks in your template), an archway (delete two blocks in the middle), a pillar (leave only one three-tall stack of blocks), and more. The other content types can be edited in the same way, and the game teaches you this system by leaving transparent blueprints around levels. If you see one of these and then cover the blueprint with a perfect fit of your own blocks, you're rewarded with an in-game bonus.

It doesn't take long to see the building potential of this system, which uses the Minecraft style of simple block-based shapes, then adds just enough nuance via pre-made objects like entryways, curved surfaces, and curling stairwells. (The latter, in particular, are so nice to plop into a fort, especially since they click together neatly for the sake of multi-story structures.) Making a cool-looking and battle-functional building has never been easier in an online shooting game.

From there, you receive an arsenal of standard-issue online shooter weapons: shotguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, pistols, explosives, and a range of quick and slow melee weapons. When you're in battle, the action on these weapons is nicely tuned, and each weapon class has evident power and visual punch. Enemies also react in delightful fashion, particularly with eye-bugging, color-filled headshot reactions that really sell your accurate gunfire.

Once you land in a mission, an array of tasks, goals, and side missions becomes immediately evident and clear. Some of the early access game's UI is a little confusing during missions, but the important stuff—your mini-map, the game's sound cues—works well enough to lead you and your friends to satisfying kill-and-collect kinds of tasks. The procedurally generated levels are also packed full of tucked-away secrets and surprises, which you'll want to scour and scavenge for useful crafting materials.

Free-to-pain

I can imagine a version of Fortnite in which all of this stuff plays out in a traditional, pay-once model. Your progress through increasingly difficult zones, packed with a diverse selection of satisfyingly tough monsters, would depend solely on your performance. You'd rack up experience points (XP) by using certain characters, weapons, items, and traps. You'd easily take your fancy traps and overpowered weapons from your own base to your friends' so that everyone could help everyone else make their dream forts.

But that's not Fortnite.

A free-to-play model pervades every element of this game, and it's taken me quite a bit of gameplay (and menu navigation) to really understand what a rot these systems have turned out to be. I lay a lot of blame on Fortnite's cute, colorful take on loot crates.





















When you beat a mission, or one of the game's many "daily challenge" and "side mission" objectives, you're given a variety of bonuses. Most of these reward you with either "loot piñatas" or V-bucks; the latter are used almost exclusively to buy more piñatas. Inside of these piñatas, you'll find pretty much every major addition to the gameplay: controllable heroes, weapon schematics, trap schematics, and a series of collectible cards.

Should you wish to unlock a high-level hero, for example, you have to earn and open a bunch of piñatas, at which point you can hope for one of a few things: that your dream hero appears or that you collect enough lesser gear to sacrifice to the game's crafting system. Doing the latter will generate a random hero whose rarity and power potential is determined by how good the loot you sacrifice is. Will your dream hero, weapon, or trap pop out of this crafting exercise? Not bloody likely.

Consoles? Fortnite is now live on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Both console versions currently aim for a 30FPS refresh, with the weaker Xbox One console currently running smoother thanks to a resolution downgrade. The game's build-template system maps surprisingly well to gamepads, and the action isn't incredibly twitchy, so it's fine enough on console—at least, with a locked framerate. (Sorry for now, PS4 owners.) By the way, your purchase of Fortnite's "founders pack" on PC unlocks the game on PS4, and progress can be linked between those platforms by clicking Fortnite is now live on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Both console versions currently aim for a 30FPS refresh, with the weaker Xbox One console currently running smoother thanks to a resolution downgrade. The game's build-template system maps surprisingly well to gamepads, and the action isn't incredibly twitchy, so it's fine enough on console—at least, with a locked framerate. (Sorry for now, PS4 owners.) By the way, your purchase of Fortnite's "founders pack" on PC unlocks the game on PS4, and progress can be linked between those platforms by clicking here . Xbox players don't get this perk.

What's more, every major element of the game (heroes, weapons, traps) can be leveled up, and doing this unlocks a variety of perks and abilities. You might think using these items would increase your level by way of XP. Nope. Instead, you have to collect XP cards, which can then be spent on your inventory however you see fit. You can gather this XP by completing objectives... but you'll find more of it inside of piñatas.

Fortnite is kind enough to dole out a few weapons and traps to players by default. But weapons deteriorate over time, and every time you lay a trap down, you lose it forever. When you receive new weapons and traps via piñatas, you're technically only getting their schematics. You need resources to generate new weapons, and it only takes a few days of standard play to realize that higher-level items require serious resources. One of Fortnite's worst design decisions is that players are forbidden from crafting weapons and traps—and blocked from determining their exact resource inventory, for the sake of knowing what they'll need to scavenge—until they're in the middle of a mission. (Active missions have timers attached, along with random monster appearances, so they're pretty much the worst place to sort through the most crucial inventory menus in the game.)

Resource fatigue plagues Fortnite. So many types of resources are required for different things you might want to do. Creating, crafting, or upgrading anything in the game requires different stuff at every step. This doesn't even touch upon the "survivors" system, which dumps dozens upon dozens of cards into your deck that you must then slot into a completely different menu system for upgrades to your hero's various stats. The survivor cards themselves have three categories, and finding a perfect match for those categories offers additional bonuses. Want to make a perfect category match for your survivor deck? Go ahead and guess what colorful, animal-shaped system you'll need to turn to. (Also, if you're wondering: a single loot piñata costs about $1 in real-world money.)