Do You Have What it Takes to Survive?

A few days ago, I was sitting in my room, bored, but with nothing to do but scroll through Instagram. This was until I came across the ad for Survivor!.io, an ad I had seen before, but had ignored like any other ad that comes up when you really don’t want it to. I decided to give it a try. I have always played games on my phone, anything that piqued my interest and gave me challenging environment to kill time. From “Clash of Clans” and “Subway Surfers” to “Cut the Rope” and “Where’s My Water?”, games involving puzzles or the gradual building up of resources have continued to remain a part of my day.

Survivor!.io, is a game in which you control the movements of a character as he fights to fend off a series of different waves of monsters. The game is animated in a cartoon style that lessens the inherently violent nature of the game, which is to kill everything around you before it gets a chance to kill you. You pick up little gem like structures called “biofuel” to gain gun enhancements, upgrades, and tactical abilities that makes surviving the many waves of creatures possible. Bosses appear every 5 minutes on the dot and increase in strength throughout the 15-minute period it takes to clear a chapter of the game. Dying during the duration results in you having to restart at the beginning of the chapter, even if you were already 10 minutes in. While the length of the games is a definite drawback, as it can become very time consuming to raise your level and clear chapters, I find that it perfectly fits my need for a time killer that also keeps my attention. Waiting in long lines and sitting in boring meetings are no longer a concern! It is free on the app store and can be cleared without spending any money on additional power ups.

I would definitely recommend everyone to at least try the game out!

• Chase Blackman

Apex Legends: The Battle Royale Takeover

Like many others, I was deeply engrossed in Fortnite when it quickly took over streaming platforms, gaming pages and adolescent minds. It was my first battle royale style game, and I loved the nail-biting and stress-inducing competition as circles closed and the number of players dwindled. Fortnite’s viral nature really opened the door for the battle royale genre to takeover popular gameplay. Fortnite, PUBG kind of started things off with Warzone and Apex following close behind. I tried them all before I made the big move from Fortnite to Apex Legends during its first season. Fortnite’s original light-hearted fun had been cluttered with viral promotional collaborations, over-whimsical features (in my personal opinion) and… my self-admitted lack of skill when it came to building battles. Apex Legends gave me the same style of competitive gameplay, but with less cartoon-y aesthetics and resembled games that I was already accustomed to. For example, I loved Halo growing up and felt comfortable with the sci-fi setting and military nature that Apex offered. I immediately became obsessed, and despite my struggles on multiplayer early on, I persisted, committed to climbing the ranks each season.

Apex Legends is set in the Titanfall universe, another gaming series, and involves an arena in which contestants, usually volunteers looking for money for their own personal backstory-related reasons, fight in teams of 3 until there is one team left standing. A common battle royale structure, but with the twist that players choose an in-game character with their own history and personality. Apex offers players a list preset characters that have their own individual abilities. The game consists of more high detail realistic maps, more traditional style weapons, with a similar “battle pass” rewards systems, but most importantly…. NO building! (No fall damage too!) I would find any time that I could to get on and run through the hills, mountain passes, and desolate buildings of the Apex arena. Playing every night during the summer, creating a team of three with my friends. We would yell and argue for hours as we tried to figure out where to land, where to loot, whether or not to attack, attack strategies, and whose fault it was that we all died. Eventually, we all had our “mains” (mine was initially Lifeline, but I transitioned to Fuse), a consistent team composition, and an understanding of each other’s preferences and specialties that led to our leveling up and improvement in ranking each season. We eventually reached level 500, brandishing our player banners with badges and stats that showcased the time and effort, highs and lows or our Apex journey. While the school year usually reduces my play time, I always find time to get on, and I look forward to every extended break where I can really invest my energy into the chaos of third-parties, jump pads, and Gibby shields while I continue to beg the developers for heirloom shards and to take the Bocek Bow out of care packages…

– Chase Blackman