Fortnite's new partnered Star Wars games were not a great showcase of UEFN

Last week I drove down to a fancy studio lot in Los Angeles to play Fortnite. "Play Fortnite" isn't a very descriptive phrase these days, as the battle royale has long since evolved into a platform with numerous games under the official Epic banner, plus thousands more community-made modes.

What I was there to see fell somewhere between official and community: a collection of Star Wars games made with UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite), but by studios that make Fortnite stuff for a living. They were commissioned by Epic, in cooperation with Disney, to showcase what's possible with the new Star Wars UEFN toolkit (which includes a bunch of official assets and sounds from the movies) while also promoting the Mandalorian film that's out soon.

Alongside a mix of press and content creators, I played hours of:

• Galactic Siege: A riff on classic Battlefront
• Droid Tycoon: An idle game where you hold left click and buy droids to farm money
• Escape Vader: A co-op horror game where you avoid Darth Vader… very easily

Some of Fortnite's Star Wars offerings unfortunately reminded me of the inglorious days of licensed tie-ins. The difference these days is that these are snackable experiences that exist in an always-on platform, rather than standalone 4-hour games stamped on a disc. These UGC games were made by smaller outfits that specialize in turning formats popular with children (like tycoon or bed wars) into games themed around whichever brand is writing the check.

Today that brand is Disney. These games ranged from terrible to blandly inoffensive. We might as well start with the best.

Galactic Siege

What I like about Galactic Siege is that it understands how singularly awesome Star Wars: Battlefront was back in the day. Two teams (Rebels vs Empire) recreate the battle of Hoth while fighting over three control points—the format is a callback to the Galactic Conquest mode from Battlefront. You pick between a handful of classes, can respawn on teammates, and cash in points to play as Rey, Vader, or pilot an X-Wing.

Developer Jogo Games, whose other Fortnite work includes "Only Up Time Travel" and "Toy Bed Wars," followed the Pandemic Studios (R.I.P.) playbook to the letter. Its only twist on the formula is a layer of persistent progression. A pre-game lobby gives players time to customize their own lightsaber and jedi who becomes a playable hero, and that's a neat idea all around. I do wish the grindable upgrades for force users didn't include balance-oblivious boosts to speed, health, and damage—even the most casual of shooters value competitive integrity enough to not hand out straight damage advantages to the grindiest players.

My gripes with Galactic Siege come down to combat. The gunplay is less than excellent, the battlefield is padded with incompetent bots (though maybe the stormtroopers' poor accuracy is an easter egg), and the screen is packed with UI elements that serve no contextual purpose. At one point I ran to the back of the battlefield and witnessed bots spawn as default Fortnite battle royale dudes before suddenly popping into stormtrooper mode. It's strange for Epic and Disney to go so far in providing tools, assets, and lore-accurate blasters for Star Wars games, just for the limitations of UEFN to still be this apparent. I walked away with plans to fire up the real Battlefront at home.

Droid Tycoon

If you've ever glanced over the shoulder of a 9-year-old with unlimited access to Roblox, there's a good chance they were playing some riff on a tycoon: a format popular on Fortnite and Roblox that can adapt any setting (such as a Star Wars droid factory) into an idle clicker. Droid Tycoon was the most stable and overall functional thing I played all day, but it's the sort of game that makes you feel stupid for spending time with it.

Activities in Droid Tycoon include: holding left click on a regenerating pile of scrap to get money, assigning droids to stations where they stand still and accrue money, and sometimes shooting other players to steal their droids.

I'm not above idle clickers—I was a sentient being during the Cookie Clicker craze of 2014, after all—I just don't believe these UGC engines produce good ones. The best idle games embrace their disposability or relish in being the fourth-most interesting thing happening on your desktop. Droid Tycoon, being a game within Fortnite, demands your full attention. It believes that I can be bothered to manually run around an empty droid factory dropping robots on various stations—actions that could just be buttons if they're not going to be engaging on their own. And for what? The prize of unlocking a shooting range that serves no purpose?

That's hardly a design flaw unique to Droid Tycoon alone, though I consider it a bad look for Fortnite that Epic sized up which genres deserve the Star Wars treatment in its vast creation engine and decided this was one of them.

Escape Vader

Last, and definitely least. Escape Vader is a co-op horror survival affair where four players wander around the wreckage of the Death Star collecting energy coil thingamajigs. All the while you're avoiding an AI-controlled Darth Vader, an invincible monster who skulks down hallways.

Escape Vader has a cinematic trailer that would have you believe it's got the full might of Lucasfilm and Epic behind it, but in reality, it's about as polished and interesting as a $2 Steam horror game you took a chance on with some buds. It's janky, confusing, and worst of all it's not the least bit scary.

Developer Beyond Creative is going for an Alien: Isolation-type thing with ventilation shafts and steam pipes that can slow Vader's advance, but navigating around the slow bastard is so trivial from the jump that there's little point. The atmosphere is OK for a UEFN game (the official Vader sound effects are a big lift) but that's setting the bar quite low. Our group escaped Vader on our first try, and when Epic informed us that we'd be playing the mode again on its singular map, my heart sank.

Integration

I'll readily acknowledge that I'm not the target audience for Fortnite anything, let alone these insubstantial modes, but if this is what to expect from movie tie-ins from now on, they've certainly lost the charm of the ones I grew up with.

But times have changed, and so have the scale and goals of these projects. Studios like Jogo, FOAD, and Beyond Creative are set up more like marketing agencies whose output is Fortnite maps—Jogo's website says it has "a marketing reach unrivaled in the Fortnite Creative space," and Beyond Creative works exclusively on branded games. When they do make their own games, their success is weighed by engagement hours and front page placement at the moment.

It's a strange environment in which to fit a Star Wars "integration." A "Fortnite game" could theoretically be anything, yet Epic's trusted partners have delivered a shallow Battlefront rehash, a bad horror game, and a clicker. They didn't click with me, but I've seen UEFN produce some really impressive stuff in the right hands, so perhaps we really need to see what talented super fans do with the tools.

Fortnite's big Star Wars takeover is happening all throughout May. These three games are out tomorrow, May 1.