Everyone knows it. Battle royales are getting old — 100 players fighting in the same map over and over- yadda yadda yadda. With games like Fortnite out right now with such a big monopoly on the market, why in the world would Respawn Entertainment even try to squeeze into the already tight genre that is the battle royale, let alone build a strong player base? No matter how you look at it, Apex Legends, although a free game, does not have the gameplay, the anti-cheat, or loot system that makes a good game.

To start, Apex doesn’t reward prowess in accuracy whatsoever. When aiming down one of the many sights, moving just a hair seems to jitter and cause the player’s crosshairs to bounce around. Because of this, sniping is near impossible without standing completely still, and when you do line your crosshairs up, prepare to do some thinking. When aiming down sights on any sniper, a number will show how many meters away an enemy is. Using this number, the player can find the hash mark that goes down the scope that corresponds to this and lining it up just right, you can-

Oops, the enemy’s moved and it’s time to start the process again.

Another problem is plaguing the PC platform? Cheating. Aimbot, speed hacks, and x-ray vision are giving players unfair advantages that ruin the fun. While playing the game to get a feel for it, there were six hackers in twenty games played. That’s 30%. Hacking happens in other games, but simply not at the same rate that it does in Apex. Recently, Respawn’s new anti-cheat algorithm banned many players, but players have found a new way to cheat, called “soft-cheating.” They have the same aimbot, but it misses a couple of shots every now and then to get the algorithm to think they are legitimate players. This problem is real, and it just might turn out to be very bad for the game.

The last issue to discuss is the looting system. To start, there are four types of body shields, four types of helmets, four types of knockdown shields, four types of backpacks, and six types of healable items. There are 19 different guns to use, and for those guns, four different ammunition types, not to mention the 26 attachments that all specifically correlate to different guns. While this can benefit players looking for different play styles, at the end of the day it’s just a pain to sort through what’s needed and what isn’t.

There are some good parts to the game. The jumpmaster system is very well done, with one person being the master and others automatically following; the places of interest on the map are all very different, and the ping system is genuinely very intuitive and well executed. So while there are very good parts to the game that Respawn added, there are many more bad parts that simply outweigh the good. Hopefully, these issues will be resolved, if only for the dedicated players of the game.