‘Fortnite’ Is Going Full ‘Counter-Strike’ As First-Person Mode ‘Ballistic’ Launches

It’s a wild and crazy time over there in Fortnite-Land.

The beginning of December marked the start of the game’s Chapter 6, Season 1 ‘Demon Hunters’ release. Then, this Friday, the permanent “OG Fortnite” mode launched, inviting players back to the original island and earliest seasons of the game to relive the wonder years.

Now, Fortnite’s first foray into the first-person shooter genre is a full-blown Counter-Strike clone called “Ballistic”. The mode is almost entirely pulled from Valve’s popular competitive shooter, pitting two teams of five against one another in a no-respawn, round-based plant and defuse mode. A team wins by either planting and defending the bomb until it goes off, defusing the enemy team’s bomb, or eliminating all enemy players.

The bomb is called a Rift Point Device here, but it’s functionally the same. Its blast will kill anyone within the blast radius on both teams. It has a 45-second countdown once planted.

Ballistic also borrows the buy-in feature from Counter-Strike. Players will begin with a Ranger Pistol and 800 credits that you can use to buy other weapons and gear. Surviving a round and getting eliminations or setting off the bomb will earn you extra credits so you can buy better stuff the next round. If you survive, you keep your gear. If you die, you have to buy it all over again. Yes, this is Counter-Strike. Or Valorant, thanks to “Flex Gadgets.”

These are special items players can purchase including Proximity Mines, Bubble Shields, Frag Grenades, Recon Grenades and so forth, all of which can be used for tactical advantages over the enemy. Not quite the Operator-based powers in Valorant, which is like Counter-Strikes X Overwatch, but a nudge in that direction. There will be no building, thank goodness.

Both Ranked and Unranked will be available for Ballistic at launch when the game mode goes live in Early Access on Wednesday, December 11th. In Ranked, matches will not backfill if a player drops, and dropping will incur penalties. To win a full match, the first team to 7 rounds wins.

The first map is called Skyline 10, and looks like this:

It’s funny, even the arrows guiding players to points A and B remind me of Counter-Strike:

You can even adjust how the reticle works in the game settings, choosing whether it will expand to show spread or move to show recoil. This is 100% Epic’s take on Counter-Strike and I’m here for it. I think everyone was expecting a pretty casual FPS from Fortnite and getting a full-blown tactical CS clone is quite the surprise! Shall we call it Fort-Strike? Counter-Nite?

Read more about the new Ballistic mode and the guns available in the game at Epic’s Fortnite blog.