Guest post: Apex Legends Season 5

Season 5 of Apex Legends is now entering its sixth week. It saw a whole load of new content incoming, including the new legend, Loba. But has the Season been a raging success, or is it more like my KDR and suffering badly? Let us find out.

 

A new Apex legend arrives

One of the biggest talking points of the new Season was Loba. The latest Legend to be added to the Apex roster. If you don’t recognise Loba, you’d be forgiven. A lot of time has passed since you’ll have first cast an eye over her in the introduction to Season 4, which saw Revenant entering the mix.

Revenant revealed himself when carrying out a hit on Loba’s father, but he didn’t just kill him. He took out his entire security, and his wife, Loba’s mother, right in front of her eyes. Without a family, Loba turned to a life of crime and became a master thief. But her true prize wasn’t jewels or money, it was to get revenge for her family by ending Revenant.

That’s when she finally tracks him down to the Apex arena.

As a character, she’s almost a little OP. That life of crime she lived stealing whatever she wanted inspires her main ability, The Black Market. This is a small shop she can summon that will allow you to buy any loot in a set radius. Although each legend is limited to two items. Except when trying to steal loot from a vault, and you’ll only be allowed to grab one. Which will also trigger an alarm, alerting other legends in the vicinity to your location.

Of her other two abilities, one allows her to teleport by throwing a ring from her arm into the distance. Great for escaping battles where you’re pinned down, but be careful, Legends can track where you’re off to. And then there is her passive ability, that lets you see epic and legendary loot through walls, and from a considerable distance too. Not great when you have a greedy teammate as they’ll steal everything they can.

 

Grab life by the Questicles

Another new introduction to the game was Quests. A story based event that follows Loba and her investigation into, well, we don’t quite know yet. Every day you can collect a treasure pack, with every five days offering up an artefact. These artefacts unlock a new quest every week which offers up a little bit more of the story each time. That is after you play a small and incredibly easy mission.

Normally it concerns you and your squad killing a few beasts, finding a location where a piece of an artefact lies, digging it up and escaping. But, the beasts that attack you die very quickly, there is almost an endless supply of ammo and health kits, and legendary weapons are lying around the place like my used underwear on the bedroom floor.

I’ve enjoyed these small missions as it breaks the game up a little. And it does seem to TRY and make it more difficult each week. The enjoyment is short-lived. Mainly because it takes no longer than 5 minutes to do, and although you can replay them, you don’t get any more rewards for doing so.

I am enjoying the story of it all though and piecing everything together. It’s actually quite humorous due to Mirage and Octane. Rather than being made to read the story each week, I’d love to watch cutscenes instead. Because whenever Apex release them, they’re insanely good. Just watch the short film released for the Bloodhound event last season and you’ll see what I mean.

 

“I’m going through changes…”

A new season wouldn’t be the same if new changes didn’t come in with the intention of improving the game and eradicating some pesky bugs. And whilst most changes tried to do that, there have been many issues too, so let us just start with them.

One of the biggest pains this season was for the first couple of weeks, hit registration wasn’t working properly. You could empty a clip into an enemy without missing a bullet, and half of the time, they’d still be standing and kill you whilst you reloaded. Luckily, that was eventually addressed in a patch. So now I’m on the lookout for a new excuse as to why I’m so bad. If you have suggestions, hit me up on Twitter @MaddOx_FS.

Another pain comes in the form of weekly challenges. Despite the devs trying to improve Apex by removing location-based challenges following player feedback, they still gone done been stupid. Because, rather than introducing new challenges, they’ve just reused old ones from last season, and duplicated many of them too. Three times now I’ve had to respawn 5 squadmates. And if you’ve watched me play, you know it’s normally me who does the dying.

There has been a lot of rework on weapons too. The Peacekeeper replaces the Mastiff as the legendary shotgun found in care packages. Another stupid move as the Peacekeeper is trash and don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually pick it up yet. The Havoc and a few others have been balanced out. But it probably could do with some further rework, as it really does have terrible recoil, much like the other energy weapon, the L-Star.

The Apex Legends have also had a few buffs and strip downs as well. One of the biggest changes being to Mirage, who is now incredibly OP because he essentially turns invisible at every opportunity. When respawning and reviving people. When he gets knocked down and when he uses his ultimate ability. It’s almost impossible to see him, and when you do there are like 10 of him running around. It’s insane. Almost like the devs went from one extreme to the other.

 

Where do we go from here?

Well, we’re pretty much halfway through the season now and I’m still playing the game. Although I have taken some time off this past week. And since I have the battle pass I’ll be continuing to jump into games until at least the end of this season, and probably the next too if I’m honest.

I’m genuinely enjoying the quest storyline, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes, and who knows, maybe it will unveil a new legend or map at the end. Because a charm for my gun and some new skins barely seem like a just reward for the effort I’ve put in.

However, there is still work to be done. New challenges. A rework to a few legends., and they could do with adjusting some of the weapons too. Maybe even throw a new one in for good measure.

Lots of time left yet anyway, so I’m sure there will be plenty more to come from Apex in Season 5. We’ll just have to wait and see what arrives.

 

About the author

Josh (MaddOx) hails all the way from Fullsync.co.uk where he reviews, writes and generally manages things, day to day.

A Liverpool fan, and someone that takes great pleasure in misspelling names. Hey man, whatever gets you off, I suppose?