Whoa, they put a whole survival game into Fortnite, with free persistent servers for you and your friends.
Fortnite is constantly doing crossovers, so the announcement that Epic had teamed up with Lego for a new survival mode glanced off my consciousness like the announcement of a new line of Funko Pops. But we just tried the mode, which has already attracted over two million concurrent players after launching today, and it’s way bigger and more fun than we anticipated—and, of course, free.
Survival games of this type are plentiful: It’s roughly the Minecraft setup, though without voxel digging. You punch trees, get wood, build crafting stations, make tools, build better things. At night, spiders and skeletons and other monsters attack. But rarely are new survival games this refined at launch.
We’ve got quibbles, like that you can’t eat food directly from the inventory menu and creating even building surfaces is a challenge, but it’s intuitive and satisfying to run around beating up trees and building shacks so far. Combat is simple sword-and-board action with a block and dodge, but it’s fluid and responsive. Rocks have a nice crackle when you smack ’em with a pickaxe, and Fortnite’s impressive Unreal 5-powered lighting looks just as great when the sun is setting on plastic bricks.
