Fortnite

My kids are obsessed with it, so I'm mainly watching it being played, rather than playing it myself.

That said, given the disdain with which it is held by many 'proper gamers', it does seem pretty cool and rather slick.

The graphics are lovely, the gameplay seems pretty smooth (although the way they use building as a mid-combat defensive technique is disorienting at times), and the sheer amount of content that seems to be available is pretty mindblowing.

I'm not sure how many of the skins that pop up on the store are new vs recycled, but they seem to get 5 or so new ones each day... and they almost all look pretty cool. They must have a warehouse of artists working away on this stuff 24-7.

I'm also rather impressed that, unlike many other similar games I won't mention *cough LoL cough* they seem to have managed to make 100s of cool female characters without really any of them being dodgy skeezy skins.

The engine seems hyper flexible, and with the way they seem to be able to constantly mutate or expand the game and add in stuff that rides every trend, I can see why some people don't feel the need to play anything else... and also why Tim Sweeny is so into this 'metaverse' idea.

I was looking forward to this before the release. It seems to have been around forever now but the previews seemed to have painted a very different picture of how the game was going to play.

Weridly, for being one of the biggest names around, I'm still not entirely sure what the gameplay actually consists of. From what I understand it's a frantic contest of building defences whilst shooting all that move. I think this'll be a case of watching bewildered as the kids play ( as I'm sure they probably will ).

There's a new horde mode for Halloween that's actually quite fun. Not the kind of thing that relies on tactics and squad cooperation (thankfully, because I've only played it with randoms), but there is a bit of novelty in being able to throw up walls when the horde gets too close.

And in crazy expanded metaverse news, they've got Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine skins and accessories in the shop today. If I could buy the classic Resident Evil typewriter on its own, I'd be tempted, but it's only in the multipack that costs a lot of Vbux

Yeah, my eldest has binned it for Warzone and Apex.

Quitters!

I played most of this season. Though I need to merge mw switch and PSN accounts as my Switch suffers a little with rendering.

I do want to get back into Apex as it was fun but it's been so long I don't know if I can handle being a noob.

My eldest only plays when mates do at the beginning of each season, mostly into one of the Dragonball fighting games now. The youngest is getting into it more now to the point he asked for the battlepass because he'd made quite a bit of progress into it.

I try it every now and again but the building and builders piss me off.

This is our go-to family video game, me on PC, partner on ps5 and son on Switch or PS4, playing Trios and it works flawlessly. Addictive, familiar, easy gaming.

Yes, none of us can build for shit and you tend to know immediately when you're outclassed by another party, but we've had so many memorable/cool moments and lucky wins that we just love it.

Epic are testing a no building Duos mode plus there are rumours of auto building basic structure chapter 3 (eg. press 1 button to make a basic house or bridge)

I'm not the best builder but can throw up a decent tower if needed, editing on a console is tricky though and I've never mastered it after 7 or more seasons.

I let the lad stay up to watch it with his pals and quietly watched in the background. Not a big fan of the game but you've got to say fair fucks for these events they put on. I even wanted to play it by the time it finished, pretty epic set piece.

My son's just stuck on a "Connecting" screen for a while now, has it finished?

Oh cheers. Hope he didn't miss the good stuff then.

I think it lasted a couple of days last time but I've no idea if that's the case this time.

Watch it on youtube and hope its back up on Monday, I do usually try and check the events even though I dont play the game at all.

Yes I'd say Sunday is when they're rolling out Chapter 3 and Monday is when we'll get to play it