Fortnite has been kicking around for much longer than a fortnight. It’s been undergoing a lot of work since it was first revealed at the Video Game Awards in 2011. Nearly a full six years later, on July 25, 2017, it will finally be getting a paid early access release, with 2018 bringing the full free-to-play version to market. It’s been a long time in the making, but obviously Epic Games is confident in the idea. My E3 2017 presentation of the game gave me a chance to go through the tutorial and some of the early missions, learning the ropes and getting a feel for what exactly Fortnite is.
No developer wants their game to be compared to other games, but gamers like to have an idea of what they are getting into. At a very basic level, Fortnite is Minecraft meets a wave based zombie-horde shooter, but that’s an oversimplification that really fails to do Fortnite any justice. Each level is played in three different rounds. There’s the exploration and materials gathering phase, followed by the building of your fort and defenses, and finally the timed waves of monsters that come flooding towards you, testing your fort to see if you were able to aptly build something that can repel the horde.
If your fort isn’t good enough, or you just want to repair and upgrade what you’ve got, you can build on the fly during the waves of enemies. My primary concern about this mechanic is that it would become cumbersome to effectively get to what you needed...