At this point, it is probably more realistic to define which franchises and brands Fortnite didn’t cross with it. Epic’s battle royale shooter is a crucible of authorized absurditywhere Luke Skywalker and Hatsune Miku perform a series of memetic dances on the virtual corpses of everyone from Goku to Ariana Grande. The homogenization of your brand makes it difficult for the latest in a long line of announced crossovers to stand out at this point, but its latest with the world of Legendary’s “Monsterverse” is definitely a cut above the others…and not just because it involves monsters bigger than most things on Fortnite’s island map.
Late last week, Epic and Legendary launched a big new collaboration as part of Fortnite’s latest season, bringing skins inspired by Godzilla vs. Kong And The New Kingdom to the shooter. But beyond that, Godzilla (himself a little a crossover queenlately) now has a physical presence on Fortnitethe map. Randomly, at some point in the game, a massive portal may appear somewhere on the island, and the first player to pass through it transforms into Godzilla to lay waste to their enemies. If you are not Godzilla, you can send bullet after bullet at the kaiju to try and deplete its health bar, getting rewards if you end up doing the most damage. If you are Godzilla, you spend as much time as you have slowly but surely stomping, radiating heat, and blasting your way across the map, leaving a trail of destroyed buildings and dead players in your wake.
What’s really impressive about all of this is that being on both ends of this doomsday scenario is fun as hell. Godzilla is heavy and slow, but in a way that emphasizes the force and scale with which you play, and the sheer carnage he can cause by tearing apart scenery or melting players with blasts , walks the fine line between feeling powerful enough to be threatening, but not so powerful as to be impossible to fight. But it’s arguably the most fun when you’re on the ground: whether you’re miles away from Godzilla or dangerously close to his ample feet, Fortnite absolutely captured the sense of scale you would want from such an encounter. The look is on point (well, in terms of reproducing Big G’s Legendary version), the sound design is on point, but it’s definitely the size and scope, which is almost unlike anything on ‘other. Fortnite has done for years, it makes Godzilla feel so special.
You can see it almost all over the map, as high as some of the highest mountains on the island. Your screen shakes as he gets closer or as a blast of neon pink energy passes you by. Whatever the version of FortniteIn the battle royale you find yourself in, there’s a certain level of destructibility that’s part of the dynamic of the game, and Godzilla completely changes that, capable of destroying entire buildings worth of cover in one explosion. And again, as chaotic as it can be, it all seems fair: the beams are strong, but slow enough that you can considerably try to outrun the path they burn through the ground. Getting stomped by Godzilla is less about immediately crushing you and more about moving him around, sending you and anyone else nearby backwards to better appreciate the magnitude of it. It doesn’t feel unfair to take on Godzilla, but he also doesn’t feel like a breeze as people compete to do the most damage to him, weaving between their shots and Godzilla’s own radiated heat rays in equal measure.
FortniteGodzilla’s feeling of weight clashes with much of the light movement that otherwise defines shooter gameplay (especially this season, which has reimplemented many more movement mechanics to make players feel more snappy and capable of a smoother crossing). He’s disruptive in the best sense of the word: he might only be there for a few minutes in a match, if he’s lucky enough to appear, but it doesn’t matter where you are, when he do introduce yourself, he attracts attention. And what else should the King of all monsters do but demand it by his mere presence?
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