Fortnite is an eventual free to play survival game—currently you must buy a starting pack—with an interesting premise. Players are tasked with killing zombies and building structures to protect certain areas from the invading horde. Fortnite allows for up to 4 players to join together and defeat the zombie army. Each map has randomized elements and players will need to explore to collect resources for their building materials. If you love games like Minecraft, Ark Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die and Left 4 Dead you’ll truly enjoy Fortnite as it feels like a mixture of the best of all these titles.

Fortnite is an early access title that costs at the bare minimum $39.99 but next year will be a free to play title. Players can expect a third person survival title where teamwork and innovation go a long way to success. With freedom to build massive walls and or fortresses, Fortnite truly changes a lot of the usual zombie killing games we’ve seen that are similar. If you are in need of items or weapon Fortnite does allow in game purchases—or better known as microtransactions—to give players a much needed boost to achieve levels and weapons faster. With tons of weapons, building abilities and several large scale randomized maps, Fortnite impresses with some new takes on the survival genre indeed.

One day the world was hit by a large scale storm that surrounded the globe. In the blink of an eye 98% of the world populous was eradicated leaving only a few humans left to live. Worse yet, the odd storm bought with it zombie-like creatures that attacked the survivors forcing them to run and or fight for their lives. You happen to be one of those survivors who comes across a message playing on repeat for help. Upon arriving at the location you are met with a robot named Ray who claims she needs help to see if there is a way to protect the survivors and bring an end to this storm once and for all.

Fortnite, by developers People Can Fly and Epic Games, seems like an extremely ambitious title. On paper, Fortnite reads off as a typical survival zombie game where players kill zombies while defending a set location. Then when you mix in the Pay to Win theme, most of us—including us here at Honey’s Anime—begin to hear the warning bells go off. Luckily, despite a few issues with Fortnite, there is a lot more to love about this game than to dislike. Let’s begin our review by talking about the positives and then we’ll explain what keeps Fortnite from being a perfect survival experience.

The gameplay is where Fortnite really shines brightest. Players will need to survive against various zombie-like enemies and usually defend a specific location that changes depending on the mission. However, players won’t just need to shoot enemies and such but need to build structures around their base to hope to hold the zombie threat back. Building in Fortnite is addictive and tons of fun. You can literally build huge fortresses around defense points with traps and even make it where enemies will have to funnel in certain chokepoints. The building elements take a little bit to understand but before you know it you’ll be having the time of your life building defenses to withstand the various waves a mission will bring at you.

Now we would love to say you could build forever and ever but you need resources to do that as well as resources for your guns. Ammo, building structures and traps need different materials to craft and akin to Minecraft—which Epic Games and People Can Fly truly took some inspiration from—you’ll have to break down material in the world. Cars, other houses and various in game environments can be destroyed thus being used as materials for your building needs and while it can get repetitive to break so many objects, thanks to the silly nature of the game and how almost everything can be broke leads to that repetitive nature being held at bay.

Weapons are also really cool and interesting in Fortnite. Players will gain shotguns, pistols, swords and a whole slew of odd weapon types that can be used to take down the zombie enemies. However, besides worrying about ammo, most guns can be broken thus meaning you can’t rely on one gun too much you’ll need to be able to switch out weapons and be prepared to lose one of your favorites. At times this can be annoying—and a clear way to make players spend money but we’ll get into that in a moment—but it also keeps the game from being where one weapon dominates over everything else. Thankfully whether you’re using a pistol or sniper, all guns feel good and respond well.

Another impressive concept of Fortnite is the hero system. Players can earn heroes via completing story missions or from RNG mechanics like the piñatas—which are the game’s equivalent of side chests you can open for random goodies—to unlock the various heroes. Each hero has different stats such as health, defense and damage as well as other traits that can give them different supporting powers in a team. What we really loved though is that while there are loads of heroes, not one feels over powered in comparison to another, they all play similar enough but retain their individuality to give players a nice way of not just being in a room of other players who are all using the same hero.

The final cool elements of Fortnite come in the form of the graphics and voice acting. Honestly, Fortnite’s cartoony graphics look incredible and give the game a cool aesthetic that makes environments pop and feel fresh. Then we have the voice acting which is just tons of fun listening to corny one liners and plenty of movie/game references that made us laugh out loud more times than we could count. Unfortunately, we wish the music was just as good as the voice acting, but too often, it feels repetitive and we would rely on our own music just because we didn’t want to hear the same songs being played. This is more of a personal gripe though and we’re sure not everyone will have the same feeling with the music.

Now as we mentioned, Fortnite isn’t perfect and does have some rather annoying issues. At times Fortnite can be downright confusing with so many menus to filter through and various skill trees and survivors to micromanage. It’s not a huge issue but even after several hours we were still learning some of the menus and that’s an annoyance we couldn’t overlook. However, the biggest complaint we have of Fortnite is the Pay to Win mechanics which are cruel to sum it up in one word. If players want a chance at great guns, resources and new heroes to play as you’re either going to need to play a lot—and we mean a lot—or pay real life money. Some of the investment options can range from $59.99-$150 and that is just ridiculous. Whoever decided on those numbers for in-game loot should consider that the price doesn’t match with the actual benefits gained.

Fortnite is a truly awesome game and for the price of admission, it’s easy to recommend trying it out. The biggest issue however lies in the pay-to-win elements which are possibly some of the most extravagant we’ve ever seen in a title. There are literal packs that can cost $150 for in game material and weapons and that is flat out ridiculous. Despite that though if you don’t mind a slow paced progression system then you can get away without having to pay for anything besides the entry to the early access of Fortnite and we do semi appreciate that. The building mechanics and gameplay of Fortnite all equate to a title that is addictive and fun, once you get use to how it all works which at times can be a chore. No matter what, we here at Honey’s Anime can fully say that Fortnite’s pros very much outweigh its cons and that means a truly great title awaits to those who decide to download it.

Pay-to-win games aren’t always a bad thing and that is shown in Fortnite. While the prices can be outrageous, if you don’t mind relying on a hit or miss RNG system then you’ll find Fortnite won’t cost you more than the initial price of $39.99, however it will be free to play next year if you want to wait. Honestly though, we can see Fortnite being a game that we would poor hundreds of hours in thanks to fluid gameplay, a nice co-op element and plenty to do in game. We really recommend at the very least downloading Fortnite to get a feel for it yourself and then letting us know in the comments what you thought about it. Hopefully you beautiful folks out there loved this review and don’t fret we have more game reviews being worked on at this very moment so look forward to those.