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Remember when zombies were cool? I think to myself, mashing the right trigger to slap down a few more with the big pointy stick I crafted earlier. That's about the time this game was announced.After more than five and a half years, Fortnite is back. Again. This time, after the first re-reveal in 2014 , and a missed 2015 open beta, it seems to be the real deal: it'll be free to play, but you can pay anything between £35 and £125 for a variety of Early Access bundles through the Epic launcher (it's not on Steam); it's coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One now too, alongside PC and Mac; early access starts on July 25th, and it's releasing, properly, at some point early-ish in 2018, about six or seven years after the first announcement.
Mentioning Fortnite's extraordinarily protracted development - and multiple reveals and re-reveals - almost feels like a low blow; it's a game clearly made with the heartfelt good intentions of an earnest team. But, unfortunately, the uncomfortable history is so heavily entwined in what the game has become, I can't avoid it. Fortnite is a product of its time - 2011 - that has subsequently been tweaked and tuned, prodded and poked, for the five and a half years since, until the original concept is almost totally obscured by all of the references to other, more focused big-money hits of the past half-decade. The fine-tuning has certainly modernised it - loot boxes, hurray! - but is it a game people will be excited to play in 2018? (Or about six months earlier, if you want to pay for the unfinished build of a free-to-play game.)
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