My best Apex Legends Arenas fight ended in desperate punching
Who needs bullets? Me. I needed bullets.
Next week, Apex Legends' ninth season arrives, and with it comes new jetpacking character Valkyrie and the 3v3 Arenas game mode. I gushed about both of these excellent upcoming additions in my preview earlier this week, but today I can show you a video from my time with Arenas so you can get an idea of just how much fun it is. And, like many skirmishes I seem to have in Respawn's FPS, one of my best rounds ended with fisticuffs.
Arenas is a team deathmatch mode coming as a permanent addition alongside the battle royale. Each round starts with a buy phase to pick up gear and abilities, like in Valorant or CS:GO, then you're sent into the Arena against one other squad. You can revive downed players, but there's no respawning if they're fully dead. They're short, speedy matches that let you play around with different Legends and focus on one fight at a time, without the fear of getting third-partied by another trio.
Check out this match I played on one of the new bespoke maps, Party Crasher, a downtown plaza that Mirage crashed his party barge into.
Admittedly, the match doesn't start off perfectly. We lost the first round after myself and another squad member got downed pretty early. Perhaps it was karma for me picking Mirage, who did the aforementioned crashing. It may also have been karma for me buying one of the most expensive weapons, and not saving my crafting materials for something better later on.
I did not learn my lesson, however, and I continued to buy what I have decided is the perfect Arenas loadout: the Spitfire LMG and the Mozambique shotgun. And it is the perfect loadout because in the second round I managed a 2v1 with no shields left. I even chased down a Gibraltar with my fists.
...I would like to say that happened because I was being confident and cool. I was not. As you can see around the 4:40 mark, I clearly couldn't land any of my shots before running out of ammo, and in my sheer panic I ditched the Mozambique for punching. It worked though! Melee Arenas meta: confirmed.
After our first round loss, my godlike performance in the second clearly spurred us on to further victory. My team and I decimated our enemies in the following two rounds to claim the win. I do feel a little bad for the enemy Valkyrie, who was probably just trying to test out her abilities. At the very least, maybe they learned that Valk is pretty easy to shoot out of the air.
If you too would like to learn to be an Arenas pro, do check out our Apex Legends Arenas guide for an idea of what to expect ahead of the mode's launch on May 4th.