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    Announcing the Apex Legends Global Series

    in Apex Legends

    Posted

    Online and live events around the world featuring more than $3 million in prizes are coming soon!

     

    Big news for all Apex Legends fans and competitors! We’re excited to reveal the Apex Legends Global Series – a collection of official, highly-competitive events that will bring together contenders at all levels from around the globe on PC. If you’re ready to rise to the challenge and compete to become a living legend, we’ve got the info you need!

     

     

    TL;DR - Apex Legends Global Series Overview

    • Initially features 12 global live events throughout the year
    • The first Online Tournament takes place on January 25, 2020 (event registration starts January 11)
    • The first live Major takes place on March 13-15, 2020
    • A total prize pool of more than $3 million
    • PC Players from more than 60 countries are eligible to compete (see below)
    • Get started by registering for the Global Series today

     

    How the Apex Legends Global Series Works

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    Online Tournaments: This is your entry point into the Apex Legends Global Series. By performing well in our official Online Tournaments on PC, you can earn Apex Legends Global Series Points and qualify for live events. These online tournaments will be powered by Battlefy.

     

    Challenger Events: These live events give local talent an opportunity to shine. They will focus on regional competitions throughout the Apex Legends competitive gaming population and award the winners with a reserved spot in the upcoming Major.

     

    Premier Events: These are global live events pitting the top online competitors from each global region against one another. Top Premier Event performers will earn increased Apex Legends Global Series Points and advanced placement invitations to Majors. These events will be sponsored and operated  by PGL and GLL.

     

    Majors: Our flagship EA live events. This is where the best teams around the world compete for the largest prize pools throughout the year. The winners of the Apex Legends Majors have the right to call themselves the best players in the world.

     

    More About the Majors

     

    There will be four Majors during the Apex Legends Global Series. The first three Majors will feature 300 players (100 three-player teams) competing for a $500k prize pool. The fourth Major is the Apex Legends Global Series Championship, where only the top 60 Global Series teams are invited to compete for a prize pool of $1 million.

    Each Major will culminate with a Finals incorporating the innovative Apex Legends Match Point system, first revealed at the Apex Legends Preseason Invitational in Poland earlier this year. In the Match Point system, teams must reach a predetermined Points threshold to activate Match Point. The tournament ends when a team that has activated Match Point wins a match and becomes the Apex Legends Champions.

     

    The Schedule

     

    We have a passionate community all over the world, so we’re taking this show on the road. The first three events in the Apex Legends Global Series are:

     

    • January 25 and 27, 2020: Online Tournament – Qualifying for Major #1
    • February 29 and March 2, 2020: Online Tournament – Qualifying for Premier Event #1
    • March 13-15, 2020: Major #1 – Esports Stadium, Arlington, TX, USA ($500,000 prize pool)

    More information on future events will be revealed soon at www.playapex.com/algs!

     

    How to Watch

     

    All Apex Legends Global Series Majors and Premier Events, along with some Online Tournaments, will be live-streamed. Whether you want to watch online or are super hyped to attend in person and cheer on your favorite teams, just stay tuned – we’ll have more details for you soon!

     

    Eligible Countries

     

    To be eligible to participate in the Global Series, all competitors must meet PC requirements, be a legal resident of one of the countries listed below, and meet all other eligibility requirements noted in the Official Rules.

     

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    Let the competition begin!

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    Wattam Review – A Charming Little Storybook

    in Game Reviews

    Posted

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    Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
    Developer: Funomena
    Release: 2019
    Rating: Rating Pending
    Reviewed on: PlayStation 4
    Also on: PC

    Designer Keita Takahashi exploded our consciousness in the PlayStation 2 era with the release of Katamari Damacy. He may not be the most prolific creator out there, but his creations are memorable for both their simple aesthetics and strange, almost alien gameplay conceits. Is rolling a giant, sticky ball around enjoyable? Sure! And even if I didn’t ultimately understand the point of Katamary Damacy’s follow up, Noby Noby Boy, stretching my character around its colorful world was fun for a while. Wattam offers more structure than some of his more out-there experiments while still encouraging players to explore and poke around to see what they can discover. 

    We start off by meeting the Mayor, a green cube with a mustache and bowler hat. He’s alone in the world following a cataclysmic event, but he soon discovers that all is not lost. By walking around a floating platform and interacting with objects, he makes friends with anthropomorphized creations like rocks, flowers, and toilets. You can swap between any of these new friends at will, though aside from the kick you might get from being able to explore as a golden turd, mouth, acorn, or myriad other characters, there are few reasons to do so.

    Click here to watch embedded media

    Mayor has a neat trick at his disposal: By holding down a button, he lifts his hat, exposing an explosive present beneath. Other characters really, really enjoy being blown into the air, and nobody gets hurt from these detonations. Wattam feels like you’re engaging with an interactive storybook, and explosions are a frequent event in the early moments. Those give way to moments that fully dive into the game’s more surreal impulses.

    The simple interactions that trigger these crazy sequences may not be particularly engaging – most of them kick off by asking a newly introduced character “What’s wrong?” – but moments like enlisting a balloon to help retrieve a phone’s handset from the sun kept me smiling through much of the game. Funomena takes what is already a pretty memorable setup and adds even more silly layers, such as the fact that the balloon is afraid of heights, and that his eventual journey upward is accompanied by an uncharacteristically energetic rock soundtrack. There are loads of moments throughout Wattam’s brief duration that pile on similarly strange elements, and most of them are delightful.

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    Wattam is at its best when it embraces its toy-like qualities. There are times where it appears to be trying to be more of a traditional game, which is where it falters. Even though your actions are generally limited to clasping hands with your friends, climbing objects (including your friends), and swapping control between multiple characters, there’s a lack of precision that accompanies it all. It’s easy to overlook it when you’re simply exploring the world and experimenting within its toybox, but a regrettable boss encounter highlights that Wattam’s controls aren’t up to more demanding tasks. You can’t die or fail, but it’s tedious and out of place. That fight and an overlong item-fetching sequence near the end are lows in what’s otherwise a simple and joyous time. 

    The charming visuals and messages of compassion and cooperation make Wattam a great game to play with younger members of the family, either in co-op or pass-the-controller sessions. Even if it doesn’t inspire any meaningful conversations about the importance of friendship – which it absolutely could – there’s a good chance that you’ll find plenty of silly fun together.

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    Score: 7.25

    Summary: Its charming visuals and messages of compassion and cooperation make Wattam a great game to play with younger members of the family.

    Concept: Restore the world from the edge of oblivion through the power of friendship, compassion, and poop

    Graphics: Visuals are crisp and bright, with an almost storybook-like quality. Their simplicity makes the odd performance stutters a little baffling

    Sound: Jazzy orchestral music shifts and transforms as you swap between characters and move between areas. It’s a treat for your ears

    Playability: It’s easy to accidentally swap between characters, and selecting specific ones can be tricky. A poorly implemented boss encounter highlights the overall lack of precision

    Entertainment: Keita Takahashi delivers another singular title that’s as much an interactive art piece as it is a game

    Replay:

    Click to Purchase

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    Shovel Knight Showdown Review – Digging Down

    in Game Reviews

    Posted

    Shovel Knight Showdown

    Publisher: Yacht Club Games
    Developer: Yacht Club Games
    Rating: Everyone
    Reviewed on: Switch
    Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, PlayStation 3, PC

    Over the course of five years and five campaigns, the Shovel Knight series has introduced players to a vast array of heroes and villains in its mainline platforming releases. Shovel Knight Showdown takes a page out of the Super Smash Bros. playbook, gathering these familiar faces in one spot and letting you duke it out in platforming-based fighting. While simple controls ease the learning curve to provide for good party play, you quickly get the full picture of this package.

    Shovel Knight Showdown drops you into a stage full of platforms and tasks you with either depleting the lives of your opponents or collecting a set number of gems that spawn randomly. While most stages are static, some auto-scroll as you battle; these levels deliver the right amount of chaos and capitalize on the Shovel Knight series’ emphasis on platforming. Certain stages also feature hazards, like the Troupple King sending out waves of minions, or a bridge over a pitfall that players can toggle on and off, keeping you on your toes in exciting ways.

    Click here to watch embedded media

    With such a robust collection of characters from across the Shovel Knight universe, the roster of playable fighters adds an additional dash of variety to the experience. Each character has a distinct primary attack, special attack (often a projectile), and parry, and many have unique movement properties, charge attacks, or drop attacks. Experimenting with the fighters is rewarding; I quickly left Shovel Knight’s more generic moveset behind in favor of the nimble Specter Knight’s diagonal movements and wall-jumps, or the tanking Baz’s Belmont-inspired whip attacks. Though the compact arsenals of moves make for an approachable experience, it also limits how creative and deep you can get with each character. While my strategies continued to evolve the more I played, I felt as though I plateaued with characters a lot faster than in other fighting games.

    Just like in the mainline platforming series, jumping and attacking feel great. However, Showdown’s limited game types make the experience grow stale; collecting gems as the main objective only stays fun for so long. I vastly prefer the life-depletion ruleset in Showdown, but even then, you can only max out your lives at five. You can experience these matches with up to four players in battle mode, or in a single-player story mode, but it’s the same action with small breaks for text-heavy cutscenes or a target-breaking minigame.

    The story culminates with a two-part boss battle that’s the same for every character, but even that begins with a gem-collection section before giving you a more traditional boss-battle experience. Once you get through to the final face-off against a giant sentient mirror, it’s an intense but fun battle where you must dodge projectiles as you climb on moving platforms and slash at the weakpoint. But just like the gem-collection objective, after a few times, it felt like I was just going through the motions.

    Despite the option to play single-player, make no mistake: Shovel Knight Showdown is best experienced in multiplayer. Playing through matches with your friends and different settings ups the ante, and is much more exciting than simply battling the predictable A.I.. Choosing from a list of cheats also helps you customize the action how you want; fast run and high jump give you a more intense experience as the fighters fly across the screen, while hurricane adds wind gusts to the matches. These modifiers may remedy the monotony of repetition, but they don’t cure it completely.

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    In addition to gems, items like bombs, character-repelling magnets, and energy-replenishing food pop into most matches. While the gems are always the priority, these assists can give you a major leg up on the competition, particularly if you get one of the pestering assist creatures that fly around and harass your opponents. These items are hit or miss on the battlefield, ranging from effective or fun to inconsequential or annoying, but you can thankfully turn off the items individually or all at once.

    Though Shovel Knight Showdown doesn’t impress with its list of modes, it does provide you with plenty of opportunities to unlock characters, stages, and skins. While I always loved seeing that I unlocked something new, it wasn’t enough to motivate me to play through the story for the umpteenth time, or once again compete for gems.

    Shovel Knight Showdown is great for short sessions with friends, or a couple playthroughs of the story mode, but simple movesets and repetition limit the enjoyment. You can dig into some good Shovel Knight fun here, but don’t expect to strike gold.

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    Score: 7.5

    Summary: Shovel Knight Showdown is a fun game to play with friends in short bursts, but a shallow pool of content causes the fun to diminish at a rapid rate.

    Concept: Gather characters from across the various Shovel Knight campaigns for a platforming-based fighting game

    Graphics: The distinct pixel-art aesthetic of the mainline adventures carries over to Yacht Club’s new title

    Sound: Catchy and intense tunes inspired by game soundtracks of the past flood the stages and menus

    Playability: Simple controls make this an easy-to-pick-up experience, but it comes at the cost of depth

    Entertainment: Solid controls and a diverse cast of characters provide entertaining matches, but the excitement is short lived

    Replay: Moderately low

    Click to Purchase

    View the full article

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