Fortnite: Battle Royale is a crafty take on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

We knew the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds copycats, clones, and homages were coming, and we have one of the first from a major company in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Earlier this week, Epic Games launched an update to its defensive crafting shooter Fortnite called Battle Royale that introduces a last-player-standing mode in which 100 players jump onto a map and have to kill and outlast one another. The mode is live right now in a testing phase, and I’ve spent some time with it. My first impression is that it works as a great introduction to the genre, but it won’t peel me away from the legitimate article.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds launched in March as an unfinished game in Steam’s Early Access program for $30. It has since surpassed 10 million copies sold. It’s also a simple premise — one that developers could easily add into their games. That combination of factors has proved too difficult for Epic to ignore, and the studio has chosen to stick closely to the formula developer Bluehole set up with PUBG.