Morgan Park
Young enough to have plenty of Fortnite hours under my belt, but old enough to remember when Epic made dudebro cover shooters and your older brother’s favorite arena shooter. I do miss those days.
Last week I drove down to a fancy studio lot in Los Angeles to play Fortnite. “Play Fortnite” isn’t a very descriptive phrase these days, as the battle royale has long since evolved into a platform with numerous games under the official Epic banner, plus thousands more community-made modes.
On both fronts, it was an unimpressive day of marketing. Alongside a mix of press and content creators, I played hours of:
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- Galactic Conquest: A riff on classic Battlefront
- Droid Tycoon: An idle game where you hold left click and buy droids to farm money
- Escape Vader: A co-op horror game where you avoid Darth Vader… very easily
Fortnite’s Star Wars offering represents, for all intents and purposes, the latest incarnation of the movie tie-in videogame. Remember those? The low-budget games that primarily existed to promote a much larger-budget film? They disappeared from the mainstream in the late ’00s as marketing budgets shifted toward much cheaper-to-make mobile game reskins (and the occasional Marvel’s Spider-Man blockbuster). Now the cheap tie-in game has reappeared in Fortnite, where outfits specialize in reskinning formats popular with children (like tycoon or bed wars) around whichever brand is writing the check.
Today that brand is Disney, and if I were the Big Mouse, I’d have buyer’s remorse. These games ranged from terrible to blandly inoffensive. We might as well start with the best.
Galactic Siege
What I like about Galactic Siege is that it understands how singularly awesome Star Wars: Battlefront was back in the day. Two teams (Rebels vs Empire) recreate the battle of Hoth while fighting over three control points—the format is a callback to the Galactic Conquest mode from Battlefront. You pick between a handful of classes, can respawn on teammates, and cash in points to play as Rey, Vader, or pilot an X-Wing.
Developer Jogo Games, whose other Fortnite work includes “Only Up Time Travel” and “Toy Bed Wars,” followed the Pandemic Studios (R.I.P.) playbook to the letter. Its only twist on the formula is a layer of persistent progression. A pre-game lobby gives players time to customize their own lightsaber and jedi who becomes a playable hero, and that’s a neat idea all around.
I do wish the grindable upgrades for force users didn’t include balance-oblivious boosts to speed, health, and damage—even the most casual of shooters value competitive integrity enough to not hand out straight damage advantages to the grindiest players.
What I don’t like about Galactic Conquest has more to do with its inescapable Fortnite qualities. The gunplay is less than excellent, the battlefield is padded with laughably incompetent bots, and the screen is packed with ugly Fortnite UI elements that serve no purpose in the context. At one point I ran to the back of the battlefield and witnessed bots spawn as default Fortnite battle royale dudes before suddenly popping into stormtrooper mode. It’s strange for Epic and Disney to go so far in providing tools, assets, and lore-accurate blasters for Star Wars games, just for the limitations of UEFN to still be this apparent. I walked away with plans to fire up real Battlefront at home.
Droid Tycoon
If you’ve ever glanced over the shoulder of a 9-year-old with unlimited access to Roblox, there’s a good chance they were playing some riff on a tycoon: a format popular on Fortnite and Roblox that can adapt any setting (such as a Star Wars droid factory) into a minimally engaging idle clicker. Droid Tycoon was the most stable and overall functional thing I played all day, but it’s the sort of game that makes you feel stupid for spending time with it.
Activities in Droid Tycoon include: holding left click on a regenerating pile of scrap to get money, assigning droids to stations where they stand still and accrue money, and sometimes shooting other players to steal their droids. (Wait, is this a Steal a Brainrot clone? I’ve come this far without actually learning what a brainrot is and I don’t wish to start now.)
I’m not above idle clickers—I was a sentient being during the Cookie Clicker craze of 2014, after all—I just don’t believe these UGC engines produce good ones. The best idle games embrace their disposability or relish in being the fourth-most interesting thing happening on your desktop. Droid Tycoon, being a game within Fortnite, demands your full attention. It believes that I can be bothered to manually run around an empty droid factory dropping robots on various stations—actions that could just be buttons if they’re not going to be engaging on their own. And for what? The prize of unlocking a shooting range that serves no purpose?
I don’t see how an idle game within Fortnite fits into anyone’s life—this should be a thing that’s always on in the background while doing things you actually care about. That’s hardly a design flaw unique to Droid Tycoon alone, though I consider it a bad look for Fortnite that Epic sized up which genres deserve the Star Wars treatment in its vast creation engine and decided this was one of them. It’ll probably be the biggest thing in Fortnite for a week.
Escape Vader
Last, and definitely least. Escape Vader is a co-op horror survival affair where four players wander around the wreckage of the Death Star collecting energy coil thingamajigs. All the while you’re avoiding an AI-controlled Darth Vader, an invincible monster who can’t be bothered to run.
Escape Vader has a cinematic trailer that would have you believe it’s got the full might of Lucasfilm and Epic behind it, but in reality, it’s about as polished and interesting as a $2 Steam horror game you took a chance on with some buds. It’s janky, confusing, and worst of all it’s not the least bit scary.
Developer Beyond Creative is going for an Alien: Isolation-type thing with ventilation shafts and steam pipes that can slow Vader’s advance, but navigating around the slow bastard is so trivial from the jump that there’s little point. The atmosphere is OK for a UEFN game (the official Vader sound effects are a big lift) but that’s setting the bar quite low. Our group escaped Vader on our first try, and when Epic informed us that we’d be playing the mode again on its singular map, the apathy was palpable.
Integration
I’ll readily acknowledge that I’m not the target audience for Fortnite anything, let alone these superfluous modes, but if this is what to expect from tie-in games from now on, they’ve certainly lost the charm of the ones I grew up with.
Sure, most were trash—shout out to my dad for paying $50 for Fantastic Four (2005) for the PS2—but at least they boasted production values such as voice acting and bespoke UI. They were often made by experienced studios that aspired to make good games despite a meager budget and extremely tight deadline. And frankly, they were in a different league: The same year that Treyarch made Call of Duty: World at War, it also put out a surprisingly not bad 007: Quantum of Solace FPS.
That is not what Fortnite studios like Jogo, FOAD, and Beyond Creative are about. Their businesses are set up more like marketing agencies whose output is Fortnite maps—Jogo’s website says it has “a marketing reach unrivaled in the Fortnite Creative space,” and Beyond Creative works exclusively on branded games. When they do make their own games, their success is weighed by engagement hours and subject to what Epic deems worthy of front page placement at the moment. This is how you get everyone making clones of the same six variants of brainrot and red vs blue.
It’s a strange environment in which to fit a Star Wars “integration.” A “Fortnite game” could theoretically be anything, yet Epic’s trusted partners delivered a shallow Battlefront rehash, a bad horror game, and a clicker. It boggles the mind.
Fortnite’s big Star Wars takeover is happening all throughout May. These three games are out tomorrow, May 1.
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