Back in the decidedly less macabre context of a week ago, I played a few matches of Apex Legends’ Season 25, which centres around new legend Sparrow. His debut is scheduled for May 6th, barely enough time for EA’s ink to dry on their mass laying-off of the people that made him (fifth most played game on Steam, y’know, maybe tells you something). He’s Space-Italian, has a folding bow on his arm, and – fittingly for how I feel about this game right now – is a massive bastard.
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Not personality-wise, you understand. He’s an upbeat chap despite his Apex-character-standard family issues, and he loves his pet cat, bless them both. As a fighter, though? Nightmare. Even with an archer motif that slots neatly into Season 25’s renewed focus on long-range shootouts, the sheer versatility of Sparrow’s ability loadout – which spans enemy tracking, AoE damage, and one hell of a mobility aid – make his all-around lethality honestly kind of worrying. I think I’ll like playing as him. I know I won’t like playing against him.
As a Recon legend, Sparrow’s day job is to flick out tracking darts that embed in walls or floors and – after a brief delay – feed his team the positions of any opponents caught in its radius. While the fact that each dart needs line-of-sight to track a target means they aren’t as individually powerful as, say, Bloodhound’s omniscient tactical scan, they still highlight foes that Sparrow and his pals can’t see themselves, which is more than enough of an advantage to mount a successful push. They work defensively, too: if I ever wanted to set up a sniping perch in the latter stages of a match, where ambushes are most common, I’d usually drop a dart behind me as an early-warning proximity alarm.
This wouldn’t spoil my chance to throw out offensive darts either, as they come with multiple, rapidly refilling charges, with the option to add more via skill tree upgrades. Enemies that are quick enough on the draw can shoot down darts before they activate, but with multiple charges, I found it easy to just carpet-dart entrenched players to the point where they’d either be tracked or in need of a reload by the time I’d moved in on top of them. Either way, they’d be filled with more holes than freshly baked focaccia.
Such aggression is further encouraged by Sparrow’s passive, a double jump straight out of Titanfall. No, you’re crying. It’s better, even, as leaps can be chained together with a single-charge wall jump to quickly scamper up buildings or throw off an attacker’s aim in close quarters. It’s an accessible, enjoyably bouncy movement tool, though that makes it all the more surprising to see on a Recon character. With the exception of Season 14’s Vantage, this lot are typically built around possessing powerful intel-gathering abilities, of the kind that can grant game-winning impetus in a fight – but at the expense of lacking ways to evade and escape if the other team survives the vision disadvantage and confronts them.
Sparrow? He can do it all. Especially when throwing out his ultimate, Stinger Bolt, which repeatedly (and painfully) shocks and slows enemies in its generous area of effect. That’s plenty of indirect damage-dealing added to his bulging toolkit, then, and like the tracker darts, it’s equally ruinous whether you’re dropping it at your feet to reclaim the edge in an up-close brawl or twanging it into a distant squad from range.
Its precision-firing capability also makes Stinger Bolt stand out particularly ahead of most other legends’s AoE powers. It’s not nullified by overhead cover like Bangalore or Gibraltar’s airstrikes, but with a gentle arc (and the help of a double-jump), it can still disrupt the nests of barrier specialists like Rampart and Newcastle.
It’s actually quite hard to think of a current character that isn’t either countered or outclassed by at least one of Sparrow’s skills. New legends always launch strong – Respawn openly admit to doing this on purpose, to shock stale metas out of their funk – but I’ve played Apex since day one and this guy is the first one that truly, genuinely feels like a spoilt child whose rich mum has taken them to Bullshit ‘R’ Us on their birthday. Of course you can have legalised wallhacks, dear. Yes, low cooldowns too. That massive area denial looks nice, doesn’t it. Let’s ask the lady if they have any more movement tech from that mech game your father had killed. Whatever you want.
Obviously, the worst part of all of this is that my desire to keep playing Sparrow is roughly as strong as my fear of becoming a charred, dart-ridden corpse at his hands. It’s a classic case of power corrupting: I know my soul blackens like a publishing executive’s every time I sneak up on two warring squads, paint the entire arena in tracker darts, and mop up the survivors with an electric death-pylon launched from half a mile away, and yet I will do it again given the chance. Is this illicit high worth the pain of being in the other end of the exact same engagement? I’m not proud of saying so, but probably yes.
Season 25 does make some other changes worth reporting, but in both the update and this article, they’re overshadowed by Sparrow’s towering murder potential. Pathfinder, once the robotic face of Apex, is getting some buffs, particularly to bump up how often you’ll be able to throw out his grappling hook. I’m down for this – that bit of string is by far the most enjoyable part of Pathy’s kit – though after trying him out in the preview build, it rarely felt like he was regaining much of a competitive edge. Thus, it wasn’t long before I was yearning to return to my overtuned Mediterranean boy.
I much preferred Season 25’s tweaks to the Bocek bow, which include gifting you a full quill of arrows on pickup – surely making it a key target in resource-scrambling hot drops – and the ability to convert any frag grenades in your pack into a handful of explosive arrows. The extra damage on these is only modest, so they’re unlikely to be game-winners by themselves, but they do make missed shots more forgiving so long as they land close enough to clip the target with the microblast. As with charge-up weapons that let you temporarily power up by sacrificing a shield cell or throwable, the “use it or lose it” aspect of these amped shots acts as an effective motivator to get stuck in rather than cautiously hanging back.
Granted, that thinking would appear to be at odds with a seasonal update that Respawn say is about “letting long-range weapons shine.” Except static scope-to-scope combat is not the new playstyle du jour, at least judging from the rounds I’ve played. If anything, camped out sharpshooters are being tempted to get mobile, be it through those explosive arrows or the new gold-tier attachment for snipers and marksman rifles that removes the move speed penalty while aiming them.
I don’t know if this will result in lobbies full of bunnyhopping snipers scooting in to blast me point blank, but after last year’s shift to the slow, overly defensive, and widely reviled “Support meta,” I’d be inclined to take anything that inspires a more flowing and dynamic style of combat. Even if it means an onslaught of twenty dart-flinging, double-jumping Sparrows in every match, as like I said, the chance to be one of them is enough make the whole prospect a lot more palatable.
What does put me off playing Season 25, however, is the fear that my time investment might be interpreted by someone, somewhere as a tacit tolerance – if not outright approval – of a business model dependent on routinely depriving hundreds of their livelihoods. A model that takes the labour of, for example, the person that wrote Sparrow into existence, before cutting them out on the eve of their creation’s reveal to the world. The game is good. But this fucking sucks.