Fortnite Has Some Teething Problems, But it’s a Promising Start

Fortnite, the multiplayer zombie survival game from Epic Games is finally available for all to play – in beta mode, at least.

It’s been a long time coming; Epic first revealed the game back in 2011 – a hazy period in time where Xbox 360 and PS3 were still kings; before the PS Vita ever existed and when The Last of Us was nothing but a twinkle in Naughty Dog’s eye. Fast forward six whole years and finally, a beta of Fortnite is available for us all to play.

At a cost, mind: when it fully releases (currently an unspecified time, expected to be in 2018) Fortnite will be free, but if you want to get in on the action right now, you’ll have to pay for the beta in the form of a Founder’s Pack, starting at £34.99 with tiers all the way up to £119.99 (!). You’ll get some premium goodies along the way to recompense you, of course.

We jumped in last night with a £50 Deluxe Founder’s Pack. It gave us a horde of loot straight away in the form of ‘loot llamas’ (pinãtas in the shape of llamas, what else?), each containing a bunch of new characters, weapons, crafting materials and other useful stuff. We’ll also get bonus loot llamas every day, to keep us stocked up. Not bad.

Fortnite eases you in with a fairly comprehensive single-player tutorial. I say ‘eases you in’, but there’s so much damn information that the game chucks at you, it’s a little hard to keep up. Fortnite has a lot of stuff going on. It’s no bad thing, but it takes a while to wrap your head around what to do.

It’s not just about shooting waves of zombie enemies; that’s only a small part of it. There’s also a load of material gathering and crafting to get to grips with. Fortnite is part tower defence too; the tutorial teaches you how to build a basic fort, complete with walls, ceilings and traps.

The building aspect feels a little convoluted, at least in this early stage while you’re still getting to grips with the controls. You’ll have to flick through building material types and aim your cursor at where you want to build. Rather than your wall/ceiling appearing instantly, you’ll have to sit through a 5-10 second building animation which makes the process feel a bit sluggish, but you can at least move on to the next area of your build while that’s happening.

The actual gameplay is really enjoyable. Fortnite‘s a great looking game; its aesthetic and enemy design reminded me very much of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare – a lovely, over the top cartoon style that’s hard not to get a kick out of. The controls felt swift and responsive, and the game felt smooth to play – we didn’t experience any framerate hiccups or any graphical glitches to pull us out of the experience.

Combat is pretty much how you’d expect combat in a survival to play out. You’ve got an array of weapons to use, and the crafting functions allow you to make new guns as you play. Shooting is satisfyingly meaty, and you can also lob grenades, call in airstrikes, and get up close and personal with a melee weapon if you feel like it. Fighting through waves of enemies is pretty fun – but it’s also great fun luring them to the traps you’ve built and watching those zombies getting impaled on spikes, or getting met with a wall dart in the face. Mwahahaha.

Unfortunately, Fortnite has a few teething problems at the minute which meant we were met with a barrage of server connection issues once we’d got past the tutorial section. Trying to team up with each other to play together was a complete no-go; inviting each other to our games or trying to jump in to another’s game resulted in nothing but an error message. Random errors also popped up as we were browsing through the game’s menus before trying to jump into a new mission, too.

It’s to be expected, though – Fortnite is currently in beta, after all. A beta wouldn’t be a beta if it wasn’t for a wealth of issues that need ironing out as time goes on. We’ll certainly be jumping back in over the next few days and will have more impressions of the game as we play more.