Apex Legends

Earlier today I wrote about Team Fortress 2, whose players review-bombed their own favourite game in 2024 out of affection, and got what they asked for — negatives collapsed, and 94 of its last 100 reviews are positive.

Apex Legends is the same story with the opposite ending.

The revolt

Bucket Apex's hundred most-helpful English negatives by year: two in 2020, four in 2021, three in 2022, six in 2023. Then 37 in 2024, 32 in 2025, 16 in 2026. Eighty-five percent of its serious criticism arrived in the last three years of a seven-year life.

The single most-upvoted negative, at 4,410 votes from a player with 1,889 hours, is one line: "Now with the new battle pass system, I'm deleting the game, as well as most players, bye!" That's July 2024, when Respawn overhauled how the battle pass was bought and structured. The change was partially walked back after the backlash; the review, and the thousands who upvoted it, remain.

Cheating is the second front, appearing in 42 of the hundred. A 2,130-hour reviewer with 2,187 votes sums up the community's read of Respawn's handling with a sarcastic escalation — that the problem was denied, then acknowledged, then not meaningfully acted on, and finally attributed to Linux users. That last part refers to a real decision: Apex blocked Linux and Steam Deck clients, citing cheating, and reviewers still raise it years later. It's an unusual trade — cutting off a legitimate platform to close one vector — and the people it cut off have not forgotten.

EA appears in 53 of the hundred negatives, more than any other term. A 3,219-hour reviewer's framing is the common one: "Easily one of the best games ruined by bad management and run by a very greedy, short sighted publisher," followed by a list of everything the game does brilliantly.

The Titanfall wound

There's a thread here that made me laugh and then think.

In March 2026, two reviews landed within hours of each other with 2,086 and 1,304 votes. The first: "If only respawn had a mech based game they could put gundams in... perhaps one with titans and uhhhhh maybe they could fall from the sky and perchance there could be 3 of them." The second, less coyly: "ironic that they're getting a gundam collab. they killed the best mech game in the world and now they're giving characters mech skins."

Apex was built from Titanfall's bones — the movement everyone praises is Titanfall's movement — and a section of the playerbase has never accepted that the studio makes battle royale cosmetics instead of the mech game they loved. A licensed mech collaboration was always going to reopen that. It's a reminder that live-service audiences carry grudges with long memories, and that Respawn's biggest reputational problem may be a game they stopped making.

What's still superb

Set aside the corpus and the game is exceptional.

Apex's movement is the finest in any shooter — slide-jumping, wall-bouncing, momentum you carry and manage, a skill ceiling so high that watching an expert play looks like a different game. Gunplay is excellent across a genuinely varied arsenal. Legend abilities create real tactical squads rather than cosmetic role labels, and the ping system Respawn invented here was so good the entire industry copied it.

It's still being made, too: Season 30 launched in August 2026 with a Bloodhound rework, map changes and published designer's notes explaining the meta reasoning, plus a matchmaking recruitment drive and regular patches.

The numbers, and a language split

Overall Apex sits Mixed at 67.7% across 1,061,364 reviews — but that badge is not the English-speaking experience. English is 76.6% of 447,346 reviews, Russian 76.0%, Brazilian Portuguese 85.0%. Simplified Chinese is 44.2% of 267,482 — a quarter of the entire corpus at well under half positive, and the reason the headline number reads Mixed. That's a 41-point spread, the widest I've measured outside Delta Force.

Current English sentiment is 71 of the last 100 positive, at a 97-hour median — below the 76.6% lifetime figure. Unlike TF2, Apex's numbers have not recovered.

The verdict

Apex Legends earns a 7. As a shooter it's a 9, and I'd defend that against anything in the genre — seven years on, nobody has built movement this good, and it's free.

What keeps it at 7 is a relationship problem that its own numbers make undeniable. A battle pass change drove the biggest revolt in its history. Cheating is cited in more than four in ten critical reviews and has not been resolved. An entire platform's players were locked out. And unlike Team Fortress 2's community, whose anger produced fixes and a return to 94% positive, Apex's veterans — median 696 hours, maximum 6,854 — are still leaving reviews that run below the lifetime average.

Install it, because the movement is worth experiencing and costs nothing. Then decide how much of the surrounding economy you're willing to live with, and remember that the answer for a lot of people with several hundred hours in has been: not this much.