Review
Fortnite
The best-executed battle royale there is, wrapped in a metaverse pitch that is finally starting to work.
No. 10 in The Noteworthy 50 · Battle Royale
Apex Legends
The best movement in any shooter, on a game that keeps testing how much its players will forgive.
Nothing on this list moves like Apex Legends. Respawn inherited Titanfall's movement engineering and built a battle royale on top of it, and the result is a shooter where a fight is won by the player who read the terrain, not just the one who clicked heads. Slide-jumping down a slope into a wall bounce and over a roof is a skill expression with a ceiling most players will never find, and it is available to everyone from the first match.
The squad design is equally strong. Respawn beacons mean a wiped teammate is a recoverable problem, which turns trios into an actual co-operative unit rather than three individuals sharing a map. And the ping system — invented here, now copied everywhere — let a silent player communicate loot, enemies and intent precisely. It remains the most important accessibility contribution any shooter has made this decade.
The erosion
Which is what makes the business decisions so frustrating. Apex has spent six years alternating between brilliant seasonal design and monetisation experiments that its community reads as contemptuous. The heirloom economy is the clearest example: cosmetic items whose acquisition cost, expressed honestly, runs to several hundred dollars. The 2024-25 battle pass restructuring was worse, because it took away something players had been earning through play, and the backlash was severe enough to force a partial reversal.
Technical debt
Server performance has been a running complaint since launch. Desync, hit registration inconsistency and unreliable footstep audio are not cosmetic issues in a game decided by a hundred milliseconds. Respawn has made improvements, and the studio has absorbed significant layoffs and reorganisation in the meantime. The gap between the quality of the design and the quality of the infrastructure it runs on is the story of this game.
Still worth playing, still free, still the best movement in the genre. Go in for the mechanics, set a hard zero on the store, and keep expectations low for anything EA announces about pricing.
What works
- Movement — slides, wall bounces, tap-strafes — is the genre's high-water mark
- The ping system is the single best accessibility feature in multiplayer gaming
- Weapon and ability design is consistently inventive
- Respawn beacons make squad play meaningfully co-operative, not just parallel
What doesn't
- Server tick rate and desync have been complained about since 2019 and remain
- Monetisation events have repeatedly crossed lines the community drew clearly
- Cheating and DDoS incidents have hit even high-profile competitive events
- The audio has been unreliable for years in a game where audio is life or death
The Catch — what it will cost you
Apex's monetisation has been the flashpoint. Heirloom cosmetics sit behind a currency structure that can run into hundreds of dollars, and the 2024-25 changes to battle pass purchasing — moving away from earning the next pass with in-game currency — produced one of the most one-sided review-bomb responses Steam has recorded. EA reversed part of it. The pattern of testing player tolerance has not changed.
Who it's for: Trios who care about movement, positioning and rotation more than raw aim.
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Call of Duty: Warzone
Unmatched gunplay, endlessly undermined by integration churn, file sizes and cheaters.
Review
The Finals
Mechanically the most inventive shooter of recent years, held back only by an audience that never got as large as it deserved.