Apex Legends (Xbox, PSN & PC)

[Tobal]

Been a year since i last posted! Still playing, but mainly for the the battlepass, for some reason just can't let that £8 i spent 4 years ago, disappear (not that it would if i skipped a season). It's still the best playing game of the battleroyals by a wide margin, regardless of the balance problems and the SSBM settings gaming the match making to be a constant cycle of put you into lobbies full of poop socking 10k+ killers, 3 man guilds and cheaters, till you get thrown a bone when SSBM thinks you might quit out for the day, and puts you in matches with average players to bot lobbies, though even then those have smurfers in them running round solo murdering everyone.

Anyway, 4th year anniversary is up since the last time i posted and we've had 3 new characters, 1 weapon and 1 new map, changes to gold equipment and as of the current patch, additional subset of class traits bandaided on to the weak characters.

Newcastle a large target with useless defensive abilities

Catalyst, with the most ear wrenching voice and lines, a slightly better defensive character, but still rubbish unless you hide in a small room.

Vantage, comes with special sniper rifle with heavy aim assist, applies decent damage and a defence debuff, a big double jump and can ping info of other teams, like shields and surviving members. Pretty good, but terrible internet teenager personality, so bad i actively refuse to play the character.

Broken moon is the new map, is a quite large grey/green map to point of having many connecting ziplines for fast travel, doesn't look any different to what they have done before, every area is large cliff walls around 1 large tower building and 2 smaller buildings.

New weapon (as of last weeks update) is a energy burst rifle, which like all new weapons released is untested and powerfully broken.

Outside of BR they often now do limited team modes, most are terrible with only Control being good, (domination/king of the hill mode across 3 capture points, 9 v 9, choose a load out of 2 weapons with unlimited ammo), as of now there is a new 9 v 9 Team Death match which wasn't tested... 3 long rounds, no quitting penalty, if a team quits out entirely no one can win, picking anything but a 'go fast' is worthless, will have to see if they patch it soon or not, probably not.

In the shop... events selling the overpriced skins you can't see for £15 to £20 a pop, have, as of the last 3 events been extremely lazy recolours of older skins with at best 2 new models of 10 they put out, even sad sack whales kicked up a thus about it.

Still a fun game at times, enough for me to come back to it regularly.

[Cepp]

I've put 120 hours into this game and I'm still rubbish. It's fun to play with mates and sometimes we win although I never play ranked.

[Tobal]

I've put 120 hours into this game and I'm still rubbish. It's fun to play with mates and sometimes we win although I never play ranked.

i Stopped playing ranked in year 2, it's a total sweat shop of people ratting in corners, refusing to act as team incase they die, so they'd rather run off to creep into a top 10 placing, which results in me and my buddy i play with once a week, sitting out our banner timer while the other kunt is half way across the map.

seems they hot patched the TDM mode, now 1 round but 50 kills (still to long), and no penalties so people just quit out if they start losing. At least i can get a bunch of challenges done for battlepass points.

[Tobal]

Been 2 updates since last check in, previous big one was a new character, an old english gent who is ok, ability overheats enemy guns to stop them firing, ultimate is infinite ammo and 3rd gun slot with gold addons for a short time. Then the annoying rework of Rev, giving him recharging overshields dragging out fights where he can tank an entire team, not broken at all. No new maps or weapons.

Yesterdays big update was a rework of Storm Point map and new support character Conduit, basically she can apply Rev overshields to 1 party member at a time, at quite large distance, which has the effect dragging fights out forever. Ultimate lays down a widearea debuff which just makes caustics worthless as it does more damage, can be chucked further, lasts longer and 5x the area covered. I don't think the devs bother playing the game anymore and just pump out any old update.

The other actual huge event is cross progression, unite steam, PSN, xbox and switch together, all currencies, exp and outfits bar branded outfits (there is about 4 blue PSN outfits that won't transfer). For me this means just waiting on Dead by Daylight to go cross progression and i can stop paying for PSN, now apex has joined genshin have.

[Tobal]

FF7 rebirth collaborative event started, 2 week event and bunch of overpriced and quite terrible cosmetics, featuring some baffling decisions on the characters chosen and the outfit designs.

The event is has Buster Blades on the map to collect, always at sprite speed, they can block incoming firing for much reduced damage while charging at people, standard shoot button swings the blade and the melee button does a dragon punch knocking yourself and the enemy into the air, where you can then do a piledriver chop back down, very damaging and even comes with it's own cooldown to limit break which boost speed, att and def, very overpowered and requires the team lasering anyone running at you with a sword. Other stuff is removing hop ups for all guns for materia which give the weapons all sort of effects, making the game a very unbalanced mess for now, stuff i hate like random critical damage (why i stopped played TF2), damage heals you, npc minions spawn to attack enemies. At the moment it's forced play for unranked, hopefully it f's-off to the event tabs in a day or so to be ignored like the the worst forced event they did at christmas.

Now the cosmetics... apex as always had a massive problem overpricing outfits, you're usually looking at £18 an outfit, and £360-400 to lootbox everything in an event to get that one red(the 'best') cosmetic. In the last year the event rewards have been very lazy recolours for 70% of the content, with rest being terrible stickers and holosprays and 1 new red item, which to be fair the upgradable outfits do look pretty cool but not £400 cool (only way to get them, unless you still have your 1 time only level500 prestige). It's also the first event where you can't not use crafting points to directly buy an outfit, hidden away in the lootbox buy menu is a chance to buy a lootbox for 1600 points which is alot (typically 2400 for new gold outfit in an event)

Now the outfits...

Horizon as Aerith, to old and ugly to make it work, the front hair bangles(?) shadow her face making it look really gaunt, the outfit itself it just regular Horizon outfit with a jacket on top in shades of pink. Loba would have made more sense.

Wraith as Tifa, very little about the Tifa comes through due to them refusing to have any kind of sexual appeal, you can just about see a white top under the huge red scarf, no belly exposed, haircut doesn't match anything.

Crypto as Cloud, i guess because he's Asian? they kept his huge overcoat so it ruins it right away, what's underneath is quite fine, they couldn't be bothered to give him spiked hair or even colour his normal hair cut blonde, total rubbish.

Newcastle as Barrett, most effort put into it, aside from the gun arm being now a tiny bracelet he looks on point, they could have put some work into the shades, they just reused an old event head.

Valk as Yufi, decent enough, why the white hair though..

2 red items, the Buster Blade which replaces your standard melee animation and takes up 1/4 of your screen without the benefit of having an overpowered cleaver to use and a death box skin (first of its kind) with an single angel wing on it.

[Tobal]

the next season(19) is here with some big changes to the gameplay.

the EVO armour on levelling up will grant choice of 2 of 4 ability upgrades, mostly cooldown shorting, +1 ult/tactical stocks and radius increase. The rest are basically the nerfs to characters this patch, given back... definitely rewards attacking over ratting (hiding, farming out the way, sniping as a 3rd party), so people not good at doing damage will have a disadvantage but not all hope is lost, you can get small to medium amounts from coffin boxes (replaces swapping evo armour) and rare containers. It's been a few years since respawn rewarded strong teams (surviving a hotdrop mostly) snowballing everyone else with strong armour and ability buffs early on, can't imagine the casuals enjoying this much.

Crafting is gone, replaced with 1 time per station use to get an extra battery or ammo instantly.

Consoles got 120fps mode(if you have the tv) though most seem to say the low res makes trying to shooting into the distance impossible and ps5 got adaptive triggers at last, which immediately turned off.

they introduced new challenges to unlock a character rather than spend 12k red coins or bit of premium coins. Problem is, there is no choice in the character, and it's the same character for everyone, which requires using seer alot to beat them.

and lastly they redid the shop to pack more overpriced lazy skins into, which matches the incredible bad season pass of terrible looking skins and 1 of the 2 gold skins being very close to previous release.