Apex Legends

Cheating comes up in 428 of the 4,486 longer reviews, and 92 of those still recommend the game. Players describe aimbots, wallhacks and a Sentinel fired "like it was a machine gun", and a specific complaint about controller hardware: Cronus Zen, XIM and Titan adapters that remove recoil or add aim assist, which players say are common in Diamond and above and visible on the leaderboards. Players say banned cheaters return on fresh accounts, ask for hardware bans and phone or card verification, and say reports never produce visible results. Some credit Respawn's mid-2026 ban waves, including one that reportedly removed most of the top console Predators ("the ban waves are nice, getting through silver doesn't feel like beam city anymore"). Others say "the cheaters always come back".

Monetization comes up in 319 of the longer reviews. Players object to $150 to $300+ collection events, heirlooms that take hundreds of packs (with jokes about friends who got one from their first few packs), recoloured cosmetics sold at full price, the split battle pass, and five in-game currencies. Three reviews describe the Crimson Universal Melee packs; one says the pack read "Guaranteed Universal Melee" yet used the normal heirloom drop chance and rose in price with each purchase. Anger at EA as a publisher runs through these reviews and many short ones, and some read every other problem through it: one player, after describing frame drops that make the game unplayable, adds "But of course, the store works perfectly." Defenders note that it is all cosmetic.

Players at every level report lobbies mixing ranks far apart: bronze and gold players against Masters and Predators, a Silver player who says two wins in a row bring a "FULL PRED LOBBY", and the pre-match skill chart showing their team at the bottom. Smurf accounts are blamed for wrecking low ranks, some reviewers are convinced the system is engagement-optimized ("EOMM") rather than skill-based, and some high-rank players complain about 10 to 20 minute queues in public matches. New players say they left the bot lobbies straight into squads with tens of thousands of kills. Veterans raise matchmaking more often than newcomers: it comes up in 13% of the longer reviews from players past 500 hours, against 7% under 10 hours.

Lag spikes, rubber-banding, "slow-mo" lag, bullets that do not register and deaths behind cover are described as routine, and some reviewers point to the 20Hz tick rate. The angriest version is being disconnected mid-ranked-match and then losing RP and receiving an abandonment cooldown. Players outside the core regions add their own complaint: Oceania players say servers were removed and they play at 150 to 250 ping, and players in India, the Middle East, Africa and South America ask for local servers.

Solo players describe random teammates who hot-drop and die, split up, push three squads alone, ignore pings, disconnect the moment they are downed, or blame the last player standing. One recommends the game but says to "Avoid solo queue at all costs". Several ask for a permanent solo mode or separate solo and premade ranked queues. In mid-2026 Respawn made Diamond and above solo-queue only. Reviews about the rule are mostly critical and come from long-time premade players who say they can no longer play ranked with the friends they play for, while some solo players say it made their Diamond lobbies no better.

Newcomers describe getting "beamed" by veterans with thousands of hours, a movement skill gap that feels like "a different physics engine", legends locked behind hours of grinding, and "road to ranked quests" that "are brutal and take forever". A few reviews tell new players not to start at all ("NOT NEW PLAYER FRIENDLY, DO NOT COME HERE"), and toxic voice and text chat add to it. Experienced players who recommend it frame the wall as the point: "You WILL get dunked on until you're finally able to do the dunking." Others advise newcomers to play with friends rather than queue solo.

Veterans (the reviews that mention Axle have a median of about 1,450 hours) say the game has shifted from gunplay to abilities. Axle's speed and ultimate draw much of the anger, the buffed Seer's stun, silence and scan combination is called unplayable to fight, and teams camping with Caustic, Wattson or Rampart traps are a running grievance. Players describe a pattern of releasing overpowered legends to sell a season and nerfing them later, and a time-to-kill low enough that it "rewards whoever sees the other first". Some reviewers counter that most legends and weapons feel viable, and a few name Axle as their favourite addition in years.

Players report crashes to desktop, endless loading or shader screens, DirectX device-hung errors, full PC freezes and blue screens, and after Season 30 a cluster of AMD Radeon crashes (including the RX 9070 XT) tied to the Storm Point map rotation. Easy Anti-Cheat "integrity" and "badware" errors block launch without saying which program is at fault, and players name MSI Afterburner, RGB and fan-control utilities, Logitech software and Daemon Tools.

"Titanfall 3 died for this" appears word for word in four reviews, and the resentment comes mostly from lower-playtime players (the 123 longer reviews that mention Titanfall have a median under 100 hours), many of them Titanfall fans trying Apex and finding a battle royale instead. Longer-time players echo it more gently, asking for a Titanfall mode or a return to the lore.

A growing complaint through September 2026: long-time players banned for "gameplay enhancement" after playing bot matches or the Firing Range, running monitoring and peripheral software, tweaking config files or on unstable connections, with appeals rejected within minutes by what they describe as AI. Others lost accounts to hackers and were then banned for the hacker's cheating, lost progress when linking PlayStation or Origin accounts, or were suspended for chat words while, they say, voice abuse goes unpunished. What these players object to is bans with no stated reason, no evidence and no human review, often on accounts with hundreds of dollars of purchases.

A long-running complaint, voiced mainly by high-playtime players (median roughly 790 hours): enemies audible across the map but silent directly behind, gunfire that does not match the weapon, and footsteps that simply do not play. Some say it has been broken for years ("Audio has been broken since 2019").

A small group (81 of the longer reviews mention Linux, Proton or the Steam Deck) lost access when EA disabled Linux and Proton support, including Steam Deck players with years of purchases. They reject the anti-cheat rationale, noting that "people are still cheating tons on windows", and several say they would return immediately if support came back.

Players complain about a 75 to 100+ GB install, updates of 40 to 66 GB that need extra free space, and downloads that restart from zero if paused.