Kings Canyon After Dark: First impressions of Apex Legends’ Fight or Fright Event

The first event for Apex Legends Season 3, Fight or Fright, went live today and brought with it an entire pillow’s case full of treats for players, and a whole new limited-time mode fittingly named Shadowfall.

As the team already knew from the event trailers Respawn dropped yesterday, plus some teasers hid in rather strategically placed dev leaks, the gracious host and announcer – and possible future champion – for the new Shadowfall game mode is the mysterious Revenant.

For those of you who know your French, Revenant comes from the word “revenant” meaning “returning” and is the name for a reanimated corpse brought back to haunt the living in many cultures’ folklore.

Fittingly, Revenant is bringing back a spooky, nocturnal version of Kings Canyon as well as a bunch of undead Apex Champions to mercilessly hunt you down from beyond the grave.

For those of you old enough to remember the glory days of Halo 2, you’ll recognize the new Shadowfall mode as being very similar to that game’s Zombie mode, with a few Battle Royal and Apex specific twists.

In the new mode, you and 34 other champions drop into a nighttime version of Kings Canyon, complete with green, glowing, fire breathing Dinosaurs in the middle, where players proceed to kill each other off as per usual. Since this is Revenant’s game, however, when players die, they return as zombified versions of their champion who cannot use weapons or abilities but gain an immense speed and melee damage boost and improved visual functions that operate like full screen, long-range Digital Threat scopes.

Surviving players will then have to contend not only with other players but super-fast and super-strong zombified players until there are only 10 players among the living. Once that happens, the last 10 players will be instructed to make their way to an evac site, avoiding or killing the continuously respawning zombies along the way, where they will find a dropship player will have to board to escape and survive the night for the win. If all of the survivors are killed or none make it to the evac ship before it departs, zombies win.

While the game mode may be a “solo” queue, much of this game ends up relying on teamwork in the end-game. For the undead team, unless you can get a blitzkrieg sneak-attack on lone survivors, your best bet is to work as a pack, which when you’re running in a group of even three or more feels really fun.