Family Tech Blog

Tag: shooter

  • Parents Guide: Apex Legends (Titanfall Battle Royale)

    Parents Guide: Apex Legends (Titanfall Battle Royale)

    Family Tech Blog Rating for Apex Legends: 
Violence - 2
Language - 3
Sexual Content - 5
Positive Message - 2

    Another Battle Royale game has been added to your kids’ wishlist this week. Apex Legends is a BR game that is set in the world of Titanfall, a first person shooter game with two previous installments. This game features fast paced, squad based combat with your typical battle royale tropes. You jump from a ship onto an island with fifteen other squads (60 players,) collect weapons and supplies, and battle to be the last squad standing.

    Much like Fortnite, this game has a bent toward science fiction and less realism. It does, however, have more bloody combat and some merciless kill animations at close range. It’s a far stretch from the blue ghost fade that results from an elimination in Fortnite. You are able to respawn if your squad members survive long enough after you are eliminated, which can make your rounds longer if you’re playing with someone who is pretty good.

    What Parents Should Know

    There isn’t much by way of profanity in Apex Legends and characters are dressed reasonably appropriate. The only real concern for parents is the intensity and voilence of the gunplay, the pace of which has been shown to increase some behavior and attention problems in younger children. Some reasearch has also shown a temporary increase in aggression in kids who play voilent video games. Online content isn’t rated, as usual, and Apex Legends is an online battle royale game so keep that in mind. There is pretty good squad based communication built in to the game (identifying locations and directions with game controls) so you don’t have to use the microphones as much but it’s still tough to win without being able to talk to your squad. If you don’t allow in game chat on your kids’ games then you may get some pushback from them when they play Apex Legends.

    To recap, Apex Legends is a bit more violent than Fortnite with bloody combat and the rag doll affect when characters are killed. The game is team or squad based and requires playing with friends. It is very easy to add people you’ve been randomly matched with to your friends list and play with them in the future. My advice is for parents to keep an eye on their kids bahavior when they play games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, or Apex Legends. More important than how much time they spend playing is what life outside of gaming looks like. Are they getting the grades they should be getting? Are they still participating in the activities they have loved? How are their relationships both in the family and with friends? Ask yourselves these questions and make adjustments to gaming time accordingly. As your kids get older, you’ll see that this works better than just an arbitrary number of hours you allow them to play.

  • Surprise! Fortnite for Android is a Security Nightmare!

    Surprise! Fortnite for Android is a Security Nightmare!

    Fortnite is the biggest of big deals in gaming. Kids play it, adults play it, boys play it, girls play it, and it’s making Epic Games tons and tons of money but their desire to not share that money with Google may be putting some of their millions of players at risk. Namely the players who are installing the game on their Android phones.

    “With Fortnite’s influence over more than 125 million players, teaching people to download apps outside of the official store is exposing millions of people to a risky practice, researchers warned.” – CNET

    Experts are warning that Fortnite’s “side loading” method of installation, which bypasses the Google Play Store, is opening up users to a ton of security risks. One such risk was found by Google’s team only two days after the game officially launched on Epic’s site. The flaw allowed hackers to exchange the game file for any file they wanted as long it was named the same thing as the installation file it replaced. This meant hackers could have put whatever malware, spyware, or virus into another file and millions of devices would have been infected. Also, since it’s release, over 1/3 of the malicious files found by Google security experts have been Fortnite themed. 

    The solution to this is obviously to roll out an update, herein lies the biggest issue with side loading software, it is difficult to push a forced security update out without an app store. This means that users will either have to seek out an update or allow it to install when they boot up the game. If someone has the game installed for a while without playing it, any corruption will stay in their phone until an update is found or forced by opening the app. 

    What Parents Should Know

    If your child wants to play Fortnite, I recommend letting them do so on their computer or a console. My advice is to not allow your child to play the game on Android at all. I recommend not allowing side loading of apps at all either as this opens their device up for major security threats. If you are using Android Family Link to manage app installations then sideloading will completely undermine your methods of parent control. If you’re monitoring activity and see something called An .APK file you’ll know that side loading is happening and you should talk to your kids about what they’re installing on their device.