Very ambitious combat system that is excellent in so many ways but chained down in a few others. Most obvious of which is a campaign that consistently puts 3's worst moments to shame and this is such a notorious issue that I don't even feel compelled to elaborate further. There's also the case of boss fights that have a HUGE range in quality from a couple that are really great to a couple others that are boring tedious bullshit. The enemy design is sometimes on par with what the series has seen before and since, not to mention one enemy type that is arguably the most enjoyable to fight in the whole series. For the most part though, too many enemies are just dull to fight on their own, and taken as a whole the roster is pretty lacking and gimmicky. Moving on, Dante's weapons are a bit awkward to use unless at the highest tiers of the skill ceiling, but once you reach those heights it's really excellent - provided you can actually find an interesting and well-designed combat encounter to use your skills on, because most of those are brief moments buried in larger missions, or deep, deep into the bloody palace.

With all that said yeah pretty fun I guess.

The main issue with this one is that the victor in a combat situation can be almost mathematically determined. If one person has more health/shield than the other, that person will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. if that's equal then If one person has a superior gun at the range of engagement (rifle for long shotgun for short, etc) then that person will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. If that's equal, then the person who saw the other first will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. If all that's equal then sure, use of cover, game sense, and aiming skill will be factors but most of your time in rounds will focus sharply on optimizing the first few things I mentioned anyways. This can be empowering since a lot of the time, you'll still make it reasonably far in a round due to tons of people taking high risk gambles early on and dying out. It's certainly gratifying to know that "oh wow I did better than 80% of the players!" but what I'm trying to say is that there is absolutely no reason that me, someone who is to this day pure ass at aiming and movement in other shooters, can consistently make top 20. So few of the choices I make that bring me there rely on skill or strategy, and therefore are essentially meaningless. Furthermore there's absolutely minimal room to express the skills that do play a factor, since it really boils down to aiming skill and mastery of a movement system comparable in depth to moving a cube around in a void in blender. Many other shooters make even that more interesting by having not only alternate movement options, but making the higher damaging weapons projectile based instead of hitscan based, and just about everything in fortnite is hitscan, surprise surprise, lowering both the skill floor and ceiling in one fell swoop. Not only this but the exploration and resource gathering that will give you the edge isn't hugely interesting either, being just mildly entertaining at best, boiling down to finding a location and systematically walking into every room and destroying floors and walls. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don't but the point is that there isn't really much to it. All in all Fortnite is a bunch of shallow boring ideas executed in a shallow boring manner, wrapped up in a package that I can't really call high quality.

An almost direct downgrade compared to the original release, the branches of yore are a frustrating trial of arbitrary guessing and the enemy placement has somehow gotten much, much worse. This on top of the very numerous, very obvious problems plaguing the original Dark Souls 2 but this takes it to a whole new level of inanity. I still can't bring myself to call it outright bad tho, since the core gameplay is still decent (though still by far the roughest in the soulsborne franchise) and the sheer viability of the sheer quantity of playstyles alone is very much worth commemorating.