I’m enjoying my time with the recently released Apex Legends Mobile, a fact that is partly due to my appreciation for great online mobile games like this, and partly because I had a good year obsessed with the console version.
But I especially like it because he learned a key thing from the mobile gaming giant Call of Duty Mobile, which has a feature that is so useful that it is now the basis I use to evaluate other similar mobile games.
I’m talking about a small aspect of the management scheme – and although Apex Legends Mobile doesn’t have the most intuitive controls of any of its rivals, there’s one small thing that works really well.
The one-button approach
Mobile phones are a little harder to control than a typical console controller, as all the buttons are on the screen, so you generally have to rely on your thumbs to do most of the action (unless you have very nimble fingers).
Because shooter games like Apex and CoD have the same key features, all mobile shooters have almost identical controls. You can swipe around in the right half of the screen to look around, and in the left half to move; tap the button on the left to point your gun, tap the right to shoot.
This scheme worked, with PUBG Mobile being a key example of this in action, but making countless other features a little more difficult. If you wanted to bend over or stand up, lie down, use a healing object, change weapons, equip a grenade or something else, you had to move your hands – that meant you couldn’t do them while aiming and shooting . Also, if you want to move or look around while aiming, you have a hard time.
Call of Duty simplifies this in a small but crucial way – when you press the fire button, you also automatically aim. This reduces the little time required to press the two separate buttons, which in a frantic shooter game can mean the difference between winning and losing.
With this little feature, CoD became my mobile game when I wanted this kind of gameplay – the whole gameplay felt a little smoother and more intuitive and it was hard to play PUBG after that.
Fortunately, Apex Legends Mobile copies this feature and makes the gameplay feel just as frantic and fast as the non-mobile version.
But while Apex is super fun, in part because of this feature, it comes across something else that affects mobile shooters, in which Call of Duty was much better – and that’s the other controls.
Too many buttons
While Call of Duty Mobile is inspired by the core games of Call of Duty, Apex Legends Mobile is a direct port of console and computer gaming, which means it needs to be more faithful to existing controls and features. The main game has a number of nuanced tricks, including for things like dragging and using Ultimate abilities that don’t fit well on a small mobile screen.
The section for touch controls on the screen is crowded, with many different icons for different things and makes it difficult to remember what does what. Which button should I press to slide down a hill? Can I remember pressing the ‘duck’ button instead of the ‘reload’ button? Very often I end up confusing the wrong icon or having to remember who did what.
The Ping system is a key example. On a console and computer, this is a great way to easily point out teammate features – you can ping distant enemies, useful items for loot in boxes, attack or defense zones. However, with sophisticated touch controls on mobile devices, I’m always struggling to know what the ping button will do – and sometimes things ping when I don’t even think they are.
The same can be said for lifting items – sometimes you will pick them up automatically, sometimes not, sometimes you can’t pick up items at all, even if you need them and have storage space, and I can’t make a rhyme or reason why.
A great example is the boxes that fall when players are killed – they allow you to pick up any equipment they carry, which is often the best way to upgrade your own weapons and replenish ammunition. At Apex Mobile, you sometimes automatically collect everything in the box that applies to you just by zooming in, but sometimes you have to press a small button on the display to start the process – and sometimes you have to choose individually which items you want, and this last option it really takes a long time.
Keep in mind that I’m not a beginner playing their first mobile game – I’ve played a lot because it’s literally part of my job. Then Apex Mobile can be a bit confusing.
Apex Legends is far from the first mobile game to face the problem of “too many controls” and I recently came across it with PUBG: New State, which repelled me from playing this thing. Fortunately, easy shooting controls make up for the confusion, but I think some really easy settings would make the game a lot more fun to play.
That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game – I’m actually having a lot of fun and it’s one of the best mobile shooters I’ve played (and I’ve played a lot). But since I know I’m going to spend hours in the game, I’d like to make a little more sense.
https://www.techradar.com/news/apex-legends-mobile-has-learned-a-great-lesson-from-call-of-duty-mobile/
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