The Epic Game Store

 

So today I didn't get much gaming done myself.  Mainly just a bit of progress in Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break and a bit of Persona 2: Innocent Sin on Stream so tonight I just want to take a moment to appriciate how cool the Epic Game Store is.

I'm sure there's a quite a few people who would turn their nose up at something like the Epic Game Store because if we're being brutally honest, it lacks a lot of the features that Steam does.  Hell, I don't even think it has game gifting as a feature which is INCREDIBLY stupid.  It caused a problem once when I had to deliver a grand prize for a game that was, at the time, exclusive to epic and I had made the incorrect assumption that gifting would have just been a thing but I guess Epic Games just assumes its entire userbase has no friends and therefore have not implemented it.  I got the game to the viewer in the end but I had to jump through some hoops to make it happen.

So despite it being barebones as all hell then why do I think its so cool? Well the answer is simple really, it's because they are constantly showering me with free shit.  At time of writing I have 58 games in my Epic Games library and the amount of money I've spent on any of that is ZERO.  Not a single penny since I downloaded the software and yet I have more games than I can shake a stick at.  It's not like they are shit games either; The Texorcist, Control, A Plague Tale, Sonic Mania, Remnant and Nioh are just a few of the standouts from the ever changing free game they just give away every so often

Even now, for Christmas, they are giving away 15 games for Christmas.  Every day I log in and BAM, another game in the library that will surely sit in the backlog for god knows how long.  I've heard its a bit shit but the first game they gave away in this set was goddamn Shenmue 3.  I didn't want to pay money for that but as someone who enjoyed the first two I sure as shit wanted to check it out, and now I can. 

They also seem to have some deal with Square Enix or something because as I was streaming I got an alert that says that Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade is now avaliable for purchase.  I've heard the FF7 Remake PC version is a steaming pile of dogshit but Intergrade was locked to the still unobtainable PS5 so just having it avaliable to me is nice, it might actually be the first thing I end up spending money on with the platform.  

Steam is still king and GoG Galaxy has way more features but it's hard not to have a soft spot in my heart for Epic when they just give me so much free shit so often.

Fortnite

Every so often a game will come along that completely dominates the landscape for a while and Fortnite is one of those games.  Created by Epic Games and originally showcased WAY back in 2011, Fortnite is the current big-hitter in the now popular Battle Royale genre and it's basically impossible to have at least not heard of it given all the publicity it's been getting.

Fortnite is actually some kind of zombie survival game that I've ever played.  I think it involves a team of people scavenging and building a fort in order to survive against waves of zombies that get progressively harder.  I think it has characters that have unique abilities and you're supposed to work together to save the world, or at least that's what it says in the menu.

However following the popularity of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds they added a battle royale mode where 100 players skydive into an island to kill each other until there is only one player remaining.  You start the game with no gear save for a pick axe that you can use to gather materials and from there it's up to you to find guns and supplies in order to kill everyone else.  As you play there's a storm that encroaches on the play area every couple of minutes forcing the survivors to get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.

Games of Fortnite are very quick too despite how many people are involved in each match.  Landing in popular areas where all the sick loot is will get you murdered quickly and if you are lucky enough to survive then the deadly storm which shrinks on you every 2 minutes or so will ensure that you're in someones face sooner rather than later.  The quick nature of the game prevents it from being overly frustrating on a loss since you can pretty much instantly get into another game with very small amounts of downtime which means you can enjoy it in quick bursts or for extended periods depending on your mood and schedule which is rather nice.

The big gimmick that sets it apart from PUBG though is the building.  You can an interesting situation where when the circle starts to get really small players are forced to sort of just build upwards since a more horizontal approach to combat is out of the question.  I'm bad it at at time of writing but seeing the speed and skill with which players build these forts at each other to try and get the upper hand is absolutely mesmerizing and it gives quite an interesting spin on the late game combat.

It's also weirdly addicting, invoking that "just one more game" mentality that I've personally not experienced from a title since I used to play League of Legends back with my university buddies.  Not only that but there's a certain thrill that comes from being within the last 5-10 survivors on the map and then getting into a fire fight which could either mean victory or a painful reset to the lobby menu.

The game also has a ton of style with it's cartoony graphics and a "battle pass" feature, bought for about £10, which allows the player to unlock a metric fuckton of cosmetics.  I never usually drop money on a free game for something as inconsequential as cosmetic items but even I couldn't resist the allure of Fortnites battle pass.

If you're on the fence about it, I'd say give it a go.  It's free, it's fast and it's fun and even if it doesn't hook you like it completely hooked me you'll still have a good time with it.