Apex Legends Mobile has a messy control system, but it’s learned one key thing from the mobile gaming giant.
I’m enjoying my time with the newly-launched Apex Legends Mobile, a fact that’s partly thanks to my appreciation for big online mobile games like this, and partly because I spent a good year obsessed with the console version. But I particularly like it because it’s learned one key thing from mobile gaming juggernaut Call of Duty Mobile, which has a feature that’s so useful that it’s now the basis I use to judge other similar mobile games. I’m talking about one small aspect of the control scheme – and while Apex Legends Mobile doesn’t have the most intuitive controls of any of its rivals, there’s one small thing it does really well. Mobile phones are a little fiddlier to use to control games than a typical console controller, as the buttons are all on the screen, so you basically have to rely on your thumbs to do most of the action (unless you’ve got very nimble fingers). Since shooter games like Apex and CoD have the same key functions, all mobile shooters ended up having a near-identical control scheme. You could swipe around on the right half of the screen to look around and on the left half to move around; tap on a button on the left side to aim your gun, tap on the right to shoot. This scheme worked, with PUBG Mobile being a key example of it in action, but it makes the myriad other functions a little more fiddly. If you wanted to duck or stand up, lay down, use a healing item, change weapons, equip a grenade or anything else, you had to move your hands – this meant you couldn’t do them while aiming and firing. Plus, if you wanted to move or look around while aiming, you had a tough time ahead of you.
