Apex is a raucous, colorful and punchy first person shooter that scratches many itches at once. It has almost perfect weapon-play and the movement is fluid, intuitive and sublime. The game feels like a Quake 4/Warzone lovechild that competes effectively in a myriad of battle royale categories. From a gameplay perspective, Apex has interesting powers and a host of nuanced strategies that separate good players from great ones. The game is reasonably well optimized and, best of all, Apex is free, requiring absolutely no financial investment whatsoever.

The game offers a variety of modes, including 2 and 3-man battle royale, 3v3 team VS, as well as other mode options. The game sells packs that can contain rare/collectible cosmetics and an optional battlepass system that accelerates a player's opportunity and ability score sweet cosmetic loot. Character skins, weapon skins, emotes, animations and quips abound as potential cosmetic upgrades. Banners, character avatars and tracking tags add just another overwhelming layer of customizability. Characters look cool and the maps have a variety of interesting locales and battlegrounds.

On the surface, the game seems like it would be one of the greatest shooters of all time. However, despite its prowess in a variety of areas, Apex does have several key flaws. For starters, Apex wasn't always perfectly optimized. Upon release, the game actually chugged on mobility systems and routinely prejudiced against AMD-graphics card based systems. Additionally, despite the game's tremendous weapon and character variety, some weapons and character classes are obviously superior and favored to others. Specifically, newer classes don't just move slightly faster or instead, outright fly or flat-out see through walls.

This character class imbalance has come to a head where Respawn, loathe as they are to enact immediate nerfs, altered a new character within a scant month of release. Not only are powers wildly imbalanced between classes but weapons themselves are not balanced either, with many weapons obviously inferior to others (Mozambique anyone?). Despite releasing data that underscores weapon imbalance, Respawn continues to offer some of these inferior weapons on the field, knowing that players that find that weapon will be a substantial disadvantage.

Despite the healthy community size on both Origin and Steam, the game also lacks a very vocal or tight-knit community, with many teammates representing nothing but mute cardboard cutouts until the next match. I suppose one could argue that teams communicate on Discord. This is not a problem endemic to other multiplayer games, like Left 4 Dead, however.
The game itself isn't fantastically deep and because it stresses accuracy and split-second reaction time above all else, hacking is still a problem in the game almost 3 years after release.

During the title's first four months, Respawn banned almost 3% of their population for open cheating/hacking. Most of the banned cheaters/hackers were employing obvious speed/aimbot scripts. Presuming that many orders of magnitude of hackers exist surreptitiously cheating un-apprehended (via bound aimbots or wallhacks), it only stands to reason that the game has a significant portion of the community engaging in cheating. If 6-10% of gamers are cheating in a match at any given point in time, that would mean 2-3 teams out of 20 in the battle royale are employing vastly unfair tools to win.

I personally encountered cheating in the game on various occasions. While not common, when you are killed by a cheater, the game experience suffers. Finally, Respawn has become more and more stingy with its rewards, penalizing non-paying players by preventing them from earning better costmetics. The amount of grind to earn legendary loot has become so impossibly difficult that only the most rabid pachinko addicts will have the wherewithal to force their way through the astronomical number of games necessary to fetch any cool loot. Combine this with a service-oriented game where nothing is owned, and the constant chase towards loot becomes a dour experience after a while.

Apex isn't a bad game and with 250 hours on Origin and over 60 hours on Steam, I've certainly gotten my $20 worth. That said, the game has some key flaws that feel almost mobile-like in their philosophy. I recommend Apex for people with limited funds, powerful systems and lots of free time. Apex is a great game for FPS fans but I would stress that gamers without a crew of friends should avoid this often unrewarding and discriminatory affair in favor of a more forgiving title.

Recommended.

8/10.

Apex is a raucous, colorful and punchy first person shooter that scratches many itches at once. It has almost perfect weapon-play and the movement is fluid, intuitive and sublime. The game feels like a Quake 4/Warzone lovechild that competes effectively in a myriad of battle royale categories. From a gameplay perspective, Apex has interesting powers and a host of nuanced strategies that separate good players from great ones. The game is reasonably well optimized and, best of all, Apex is free, requiring absolutely no financial investment whatsoever. The game offers a variety of modes, including 2 and 3-man battle royale, 3v3 team VS, as well as other mode options. The game sells packs that can contain rare/collectible cosmetics and an optional battlepass system that accelerates a player's opportunity and ability score sweet cosmetic loot. Character skins, weapon skins, emotes, animations and quips abound as potential cosmetic upgrades. Banners, character avatars and tracking tags add just another overwhelming layer of customizability. Characters look cool and the maps have a variety of interesting locales and battlegrounds. On the surface, the game seems like it would be one of the greatest shooters of all time. However, despite its prowess in a variety of areas, Apex does have several key flaws. For starters, Apex wasn't always perfectly optimized. Upon release, the game actually chugged on mobility systems and routinely prejudiced against AMD-graphics card based systems. Additionally, despite the game's tremendous weapon and character variety, some weapons and character classes are obviously superior and favored to others. Specifically, newer classes don't just move slightly faster or instead, outright fly or flat-out see through walls. This character class imbalance has come to a head where Respawn, loathe as they are to enact immediate nerfs, altered a new character within a scant month of release. Not only are powers wildly imbalanced between classes but weapons themselves are not balanced either, with many weapons obviously inferior to others (Mozambique anyone?). Despite releasing data that underscores weapon imbalance, Respawn continues to offer some of these inferior weapons on the field, knowing that players that find that weapon will be a substantial disadvantage. Despite the healthy community size on both Origin and Steam, the game also lacks a very vocal or tight-knit community, with many teammates representing nothing but mute cardboard cutouts until the next match. I suppose one could argue that teams communicate on Discord. This is not a problem endemic to other multiplayer games, like Left 4 Dead, however. The game itself isn't fantastically deep and because it stresses accuracy and split-second reaction time above all else, hacking is still a problem in the game almost 3 years after release. During the title's first four months, Respawn banned almost 3% of their population for open cheating/hacking. Most of the banned cheaters/hackers were employing obvious speed/aimbot scripts. Presuming that many orders of magnitude of hackers exist surreptitiously cheating un-apprehended (via bound aimbots or wallhacks), it only stands to reason that the game has a significant portion of the community engaging in cheating. If 6-10% of gamers are cheating in a match at any given point in time, that would mean 2-3 teams out of 20 in the battle royale are employing vastly unfair tools to win. I personally encountered cheating in the game on various occasions. While not common, when you are killed by a cheater, the game experience suffers. Finally, Respawn has become more and more stingy with its rewards, penalizing non-paying players by preventing them from earning better costmetics. The amount of grind to earn legendary loot has become so impossibly difficult that only the most rabid pachinko addicts will have the wherewithal to force their way through the astronomical number of games necessary to fetch any cool loot. Combine this with a service-oriented game where nothing is owned, and the constant chase towards loot becomes a dour experience after a while. Apex isn't a bad game and with 250 hours on Origin and over 60 hours on Steam, I've certainly gotten my $20 worth. That said, the game has some key flaws that feel almost mobile-like in their philosophy. I recommend Apex for people with limited funds, powerful systems and lots of free time. Apex is a great game for FPS fans but I would stress that gamers without a crew of friends should avoid this often unrewarding and discriminatory affair in favor of a more forgiving title. Recommended. 8/10.