Hands-On With Apex Legends' New Casual LTM, Control

thegamer.com:

Have you ever run into those cheaters that form two or three squads and join spike the queue so they can run around Kings Canyon as a team of nine? You walk out of Bunker, and suddenly you’re surrounded by Caustic traps and electric fences and getting blasted by ults from every direction. Now imagine that happens in every game, and you’ve got Apex Legends’ new LTM game mode, Control.

Of course, Control is nowhere near that oppressive. You may be facing down nine legends, but you’ve got eight teammates by your side pushing back. Control is Apex’s take on the casual arena shooter genre that games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo have dominated for the past two decades. Each team of nine spawn on opposite sides of a map and fight for control over three capture zones. Whichever team holds more captures points for longer wins. Matches are short, respawns are nearly instant, and you can win even if you do nothing.

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On paper, Control seems like a bad fit. Everything that makes Apex a great battle royale - the carefully balanced Legends, the synergies between abilities, the strategic positioning and high level map awareness that allows skilled players to take advantageous fights - all go out the window in this glorified deathmatch mode. My first instinct was to write of Control as an over-extension, Respawn’s attempt to attract a casual arena shooter audience instead of focusing on what makes Apex great in the first place.

But then I played it, and I had a blast.

There’s no doubt that Control is a casual game mode. You don’t have to worry about finding loot, since you spawn with infinite ammo in a full loadout that upgrades over time.