The countdown is over, and Fortnite has unleashed what might be its most ambitious event to date in terms of set pieces, though perhaps not in reshaping the structure of the map, as has happened in the past.
All during season 9, Fortnite has been teasing the arrival of a monster that escaped from under Polar Peak, and roamed around wearing Polar Peak on its head afterward. In response, the citizens of Fortnite Island (I don’t know what the island is actually called) built a giant mecha robot. After a week-long countdown, the two squared off and it was pretty epic, though there were few actual surprises the deviated from what was expected given all the hype.
The fight started with the monster arriving from the water on the west side of the island, and then the mecha was activated from its resting place in the volcano. They shot each other with energy blasts and missiles, and eventually the mecha (keep in mind these things are like 300 feet tall on the map) sprinted at the monster, tackling it halfway across the map somewhere near Pleasant Park, I think.
But the monster recovered, ripped the mecha’s arm off, and it was forced to craw to Loot Lake where it pulled some sort of power source out of the device at the lake and fended off the monster.
Then, it headed to Neo Tilted, where it pulled a sword out of the ground (it was hidden under the Singularity statue) and drove it into the creature’s skull. Now, the sword and the skull are stuck in the map south east of Neo Tilted as permanent fixtures. The mecha, victorious, flew off into the stars.
This was A) extremely cool to watch, as you had a jetpack so you could follow the action around yourself as a kind of moving camera but B) actually a tiny bit…less than I expected. I thought that most of the map would end up destroyed from this, but there seems to be relatively little permanent damage to the map, and no major landmarks destroyed. Additionally, I was almost positive that there was going to be some kind of component where we, the players, damaged the monster in an effort to help out the mecha, given that we’ve been experimenting with platform-wide HP pools that require players to all chip in to hack down a rock or glacier. But that didn’t happen either, and we were just passive observers.
Still, it was mighty cool, and I do find myself wondering if some other event is coming to reshape the map because well, this wasn’t it. I don’t know how the map will change in season 10, which is just around the corner, but almost nothing was destroyed here that needs to be rebuilt. Anyway, watch the event above for yourself if you missed it live.
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