Fortnite on Switch | Early Impressions

Fortnite was recently released for the Nintendo Switch, and I had never played Fortnite prior to its release. I've always been a little interested, so I gave the Switch version a shot. Here are my thoughts on the Switch version, but also on Fortnite as a whole.

Fortnite is a battle royale game, which essentially means that you are on the same island as a large number of other players. You all have limited weapons/items (in Fortnite you have a pickaxe) and you need to find other weapons. Fortnite also lets you mine resources and use those resource to make walls, floors, ramps, and pyramids.

Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds (PUBG) are the two major battle royale games. I've tried PUBG on a smartphone, and wasn't impressed enough to try it on a good gaming platform. Fortnite, largely because it's free, impressed me far more due to its colorful art style, beautiful character models, and excellent sound design.

Fortnite was immediately confusing. There is no training mode that I could find, and I wasn't able to change my character (it's selected randomly each match). After playing a few matches I got used to the game mechanics and stopped caring about my character model, since they all have the same abilities.

The way the game presents itself is what makes Fortnite fun to me. I love that you find items in chests, I like the way the storm looks, and I really can't get over the character models. What I don't love is how hard it is to tell what type of gun you're using. Some guns are obviously shotguns, but sometimes I think I have a shotgun when it's actually a rapidfire gun. This has resulted in far more deaths than I'd like, and having text pop-up when you select a weapon would be nice.

Control wise Fortnite is a mess, but I don't think it could be any better. The building mechanic is not intuitive with a controller, which is my biggest problem with the controls, and really my biggest problem with the console version as a whole. In the age where PUBG gets criticised for poor optimization on Xbox One, Fortnite manages to look gorgeous on much weaker hardware.

Conclusion:

I think Fortnite is a fun game. The Switch version is a great option if your computer can't run it very well. The Switch version has the same great artstyle, and while it takes getting used to, the controls aren't that bad either, though motion controlled aiming would be great for Splatoon fans.