The first real season of Fortnite I played, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s a ton of fun to run around as goofy / cool / collab skins, spamming dance emotes and generally being a menace to the sweats.

Zero Build carries this game on its back, and I don’t think I’d be able to play without it. I’m personally not in this game for the competition — getting a victory royale is great but it’s not my primary focus — instead I find enjoyment in completing quests and just playing the game.

As for this season in particular, I thought it was fine. The Indiana Jones quests were enjoyable and I loved the Star Wars content. I’m primarily a solo player so I can only speak to the content I played. But I had a lot of fun with it.

Worst season in at least year and a half.

New SMG is bad, the map is still not 100% ready for the most popular game mode, lots of bugs (chest opening is broken), battlepass is meh and so on.

The worst part is that there aren’t enough lobbies available and currently is impossible to play without crossplay enabled. The “chill” season is the sweatest, just like the summer is…

Update: not even dragon ball can save this mess of a season

Some cool new weapons in this season (maybe just newly unvaulted for me), including the Hammer Assault Rifle and the DMR.
Charge SMG was fun but unreliable.

Loss of blimps (and jetpacks) was a bummer, but the giant tree and new mushroom biome was pretty cool. Some memorable firefights and sniper parties in the tree.
Tilted Towers (Tilty Towee) was a highlight for sure. The last blimp plus the option for sniping, building shenanigans, street-cover fighting, and fun assaults and retreats into the surrounding areas made it awesome and memorable.

Personal loot trees seemed cool at first, but I think they are a bad mechanic for a game like this. Since they are basically in a static spot, you are heavily incentivized to drop in the same place every game and check the same locations for loot, which has some appeal from an optimization standpoint, but is a destructive pattern.

I had fun with this season, but the trees putting my team on repeat definitely brought it down for me.

"A Solid Filler Season"

As I expected, a summer season being released shortly after the wave of new content introduced in the previous season contained less game-changing content overall. There were still some cool crossover skins with Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and even an awesome Dragon Ball Z event where players could Kamehameha each other and fling around the map on clouds. The map changed in a spectacular fashion introducing new fungi infested points of interest while also containing a relaxed beach vibe throughout. There was still a steady stream of content, but the impact and novelty of a lot of items wore off. Additionally, the outright removal of some items disappointed me and left a sour note on the season to begin with.

The map changes were definitely the most obvious out of the gate, with Tilted Towers needing full reconstruction and magical mushrooms infesting the entire map. There was a huge injection of color and vibrance throughout which was interesting yet led to some balance issues. I felt that the new reality tree seeds allowed for way too many high-quality weapon drops at once, and this was a huge problem in the first couple of weeks since you could get THREE legendary weapons from one seed vs. only one later on in the season. Besides this, the map had cool additions like the Baller which allowed you to pull tricks like "Overwatch's" Hammond around the map as well as other things like Imperial Stormtrooper checkpoints all around the map.

The start of the season actually saw much more item/vehicle/weapon removals than additions. I was sad to see the Anvil Rocket Launcher, Hunter Bolt-Action Sniper, Titan Tank, Remote Explosives, and Choppa leave as they were interesting additions to the gameplay loop that I felt were properly balanced and fun to interact with. However, Epic would try to alleviate these losses with the Grapple Glove, Lightsabers, and Kamehameha with other limited-time items like the Flare Gun and Junk Rift entering the loot pool.

There was also a removal of the dreadfully overpowered Drum Shotgun, though an equally atrocious weapon in the Charge SMG took its place for a majority of the season. This gun was so incredibly bad that many players would resort to smacking each other with pickaxes vs. using the gun (not that this method was better, but people just hated USING it). There was also an increased mobility meta which made things fun but sort of chaotic, leading to a mixed feeling on fight quality as the season progressed.

Overall, I have a fonder opinion of this season looking back on it. While it was disappointing to see a lot of my favorite mechanics leave the game, there was an overhaul of the map design and enough interesting little crossover events throughout the summer that made this game something I would still play regularly.

Final Verdict: 8/10 (Great)

I think this season has been good, I like the theme it has of chill vibes and the Reality Tree affecting different environments has been nice. I also like how the map has been redesigned for this season, like Covert Cavern being rethemed as an amusement park where you can ride in the returning Ballers. The Darth Vader boss (Albeit kind of annoying at first since everyone can see where he is when he lands so they just kind of dogpile on him at the start) is also really well-designed and his Lightsaber as a mythic is really neat.

In general I like pretty much all of the Battle Pass skins, with Evie and Darth Vader being my favorites, but I also think Snap is really creative and neat especially since previous customizable Battle Pass skins have just been rearranging weapons and cosmetics whereas he is fully customizable. Despite my love for the films I do think Indiana Jones is a strange inclusion (Why isn't he an item shop skin?) but I do like his skin as well as his cosmetics regardless.

However I feel like where this season kind of faulters is how barren it feels. The theme of the season is chill vibes and celebration yet no one is celebrating and you're all still fighting each other. It'd be nice if Epic added a social mode where people can utilize more of this season's features a lot better but that seems unlikely. EXP gain is also significantly nerfed in comparison to previous seasons with it being much harder to get EXP as of now, although this could change later in the season. I also have to criticize the Grapple Gloves as they're essentially a highly downgraded version of the Webslingers, and with Epic's relationship with Marvel and the huge presence of Spider-Man content this entire chapter I'm not sure why they couldn't bring them back.

So overall it's not bad, I think this season is a start, I do think there is some work on it that could be done to make it better however, hoping that Epic ends up sticking the landing.

Map:
The new forest is cool and I really like the chill aesthetic that's all over the map. Some locations also change eras in some matches which is interested. It feels like a good 25% of the map is new. The later updates changed a few area which is a bit refreshing.

Battle Pass:
On average the skins look a lot better than last seasons and Darth Vader is cool. I don't really care much for the bonus rewards this time tho. The DBZ event pass is a great extra.

Crossovers:
The new Naruto skins and the Dragon Ball crossover are great. Some of my favorite skins in the games, the weapons they come with are fun, and cool emotes.

It was fine, it was a little too sweaty starting out, and most of the stuff they added was neat but after a handful of times, I'd never use it besides times my friends wanted to try it. (mostly the Baller).

The new crossover stuff was neat, The DBZ stuff was neat but I felt like it overstayed its welcome, especially the DBZ weapons.

Honestly the best part of this season was that It's the season I got most of my friends into the game, which is when I was finally able to have some of the most fun I've ever had playing a multiplayer game.