Cool Maps For Fortnite

[Vangele Ioannidis]

Thebest Fortnite Creative codes and maps prove that Epic seeks to become the one-stop shop for gamers' wildest dreams. After humble beginnings, the developer has grown Fortnite Creative mode into its own massive piece of the Fortnite experience, and it continues to receive regular updates every month. While most players think of Fortnite as a battle royale game, there exists a huge population of players that never even step foot in the game's marquee mode. Instead, they spend all their time building their own creations such as new game modes, atmospheric dioramas, and callbacks to pop culture and long-past Fortnite favorites alike.

The hard work clearly pays off, and in gameplay, art direction, or often both, it's clear to see the community has plenty of talent of its own. It's no wonder Epic often commissions players to build some of the game's official event stages in Creative, such as the Shortnitemares Theater. We checked out some popular Creative maps and hidden gems alike and have highlighted some of the best Fortnite Creative maps below, each with credit to their creators and the Creative codes you'll need to find them in the massive sea of Fortnite Creative content.

If you're new to Fortnite Creative, you can load directly into the Creative Hub from Fortnite's main menu, or use the Discover tab from within battle royale to browse the entire library of Creative content. There you can browse using genre tags, check out what's new and trending, or directly go to a game by typing in its Creative code. Speaking of those, here are 10 great Fortnite Creative codes to try out first.

This visually jaw-dropping micro-map is meant to be played in 2v2, but there's plenty of reason to queue up even if you don't want to fight. It's the prettiest map I've found in Creative to date. Taking a stroll around this cyberpunk city makes for a brilliant first impression for Fortnite Creative too. If you know anyone who hasn't played much in Creative before, bring them to Cyber Gunfight and catch them when they faint.

For the Fortnite players still clamoring for the OG map, Athena Royale has you covered. We wrote about this massive undertaking previously, but if you missed it, here's what you need to know. Athena Royale is a near 1:1 (and getting closer all the time) recreation of the Chapter 1 Fortnite map, Athena. For veteran players, this fan-made map is surely nostalgic, and the in-game battle stars system should give it some legs for players who want to migrate back to their old stomping grounds.

There's no shortage of horde mode creations from the fans, but Lockdown stands out for its excellent level design. Not only does it have an eerie abandoned research station vibe of a Dead Space or Alien, but it's got secrets to discover and a well-considered upgrade path to help players go the distance. There's no true ending to the game mode, and currently, the leaderboards are topped by a player who outlasted almost 4,000 monsters. Can you beat that?

For players who like the cityscapes of Fortnite more than the natural areas, Uptown Road Rush is a fun hub of PvPvE gameplay. You can queue into public lobbies, but the Vegas-esque city, an abundance of weapons vending machines, and the constantly spawning monsters make for a fun Creative map for a group looking to just mess around for a while. There's no building in this mode either, giving it a more traditional third-person shooter setup for those looking for that.

If the aforementioned sci-fi horde mode isn't your style, perhaps this fantasy take on the game mode is. The coolest part about Secret of Atlantis is when, early on, you gather enough coins from dropped foes so that you can open the gates to the proper level. Moving down a massive staircase that plunges into the deep, revealing a bioluminescent paradise is simply incredible. I only wish I had more time to admire the view, but the charging sea monsters have other plans.

Realm Royale stands out as more than just another horde mode for two reasons. First, its name is a reference to the ever-changing landscape of its levels. Offering five different "realms" in a randomized order with each playthrough, such as western and tropical levels, all before a final boss battle, Realms is not bound to any one aesthetic. Beyond that variety, it's also the only horde mode on this list with its own intro cinematic and secret ending if you can get past the challenging final boss.

Zone Wars is one of the most popular Fortnite modes outside of battle royale. Tilted Towers is arguably the most cherished POI in Fortnte history. Put them together and you naturally get a fan-favorite mode. In the elongated game mode, players compete on a small play space amid an always-moving storm. It's one of the most competitive modes in the game, so it's not for the faint of heart who may just be looking to check out unique projects in Creative. But if you're up for it, Tilted Zone Wars will test your mettle more than most.

If you'd rather get off your feet and behind the wheel of the fastest car in Fortnite, Truck Pursuit is an inventive vehicular combat mode where players in big rigs endlessly pursue opponents driving Whiplash cars. Through a twisting obstacle course of jumps, tunnels, and narrow passageways, players in cars must stay on the road and out of the watery grave below for as long as they can. Trucks, meanwhile, endlessly pursue the car drivers until they've Christine'd them all off the road and declared victory.

Despite the silly emotes and the cartoonish art direction, Fortnite still has the ability to get properly scary. Teddy is a great example of that. The setup is familiar as an asymmetrical horror game where one killer hunts down five survivors stranded in a haunted mansion, but it's that mansion that steals the show. From the poorly-lit corridors to the creepy portraits on the walls, Teddy unleashes all of Fortnite Creative's best horror assets and puts them in one tightly-made level where you'll never hear enemy footsteps the same again.

Fashion shows are Fortnite Creative at its most charming, and maybe a bit absurd too. Players can queue into this dazzling 50-player fashion show and take turns walking the runway, strutting their stuff, and hopefully earning the admiration of their peers. As a spectator, you get to vote on each runway model as they come down the corridor, and though the voting system seems to be spammed with borderline-griefers who admittedly are impossible to please, it's well worth at least one visit just to see Fortnite in a whole new light.

When Epic teased Fortnite's new season a few weeks ago, I was stoked to see the battle royale game get a cyberpunk makeover. But after thinking about Fortnite's approach to map design, I quickly realized that this cool new metropolis would only be taking over one portion of the map. Sure enough, when I booted the game up, the cyberpunkening had come to one small section, Mega City, a dense and highly vertical sector that fills the same role Tilted Towers has in the past.

Mega City is cool, don't get me wrong. It has neon-drenched skyscrapers, grind rails, speedy motorcycles, and ropes that allow you to zip from the top of a building to the street below in seconds. It's a cool area, but it's just a single piece of a map that also includes a remote arctic laboratory, multiple fortresses, a mine, and bamboo forests.

This is how Epic approaches Fortnite's map design. Its genre predecessor PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has multiple maps and each one feels internally consistent. Vikendi is snowy. Sanhok is covered in dense jungle. Miramar is a sandy desert. But Fortnite has always rejected that model, opting instead to cram a ton of variety into a single playground. PUBG's maps feel like individual regions in a big open-world game, but Fortnite's map functions like an open-world map in miniature. It's like if Aloy could run from Horizon Zero Dawn's jungles in the south to the Frozen Wilds in the north in five minutes.

As a design choice, it has major advantages. Fortnite has always felt excitingly dynamic because each place you land feels drastically different from other places on the map. As the game has consistently improved its movement, with slides, grind rails, characters like Spider-Man and the upcoming Eren Yeager who can swing through the air, and a new sword that lets you warp toward your opponent, it has only gotten more fun to travel across the map and wildly different environments ensure that you'll see something cool along the way.

But it also feels like Epic is hedging its bets. Though the ads for MEGA have been very neon forward, players who don't like that aesthetic can still get classic Fortnite on most of the map. That's nice for them, but it feels like limiting the game to one map holds it back from fully exploring design ideas. The extent of Mega City is some skyscrapers, a tangle of grind rails, and streets to race around on. But if Epic committed to doing a full cyberpunk map, it would push it to greater invention. As it stands, it's a fairly surface level futuristic Tilted Towers facelift. But if Epic had to redo the whole map, we could get its take on ripper docs, hovercraft lots and skylanes, various neighborhoods, shops, and more.

We tend to think of artists being most creative when they're presented with a blank canvas and told to go wild. But, great ideas often emerge from constraints. Epic having to push itself to fill a whole map with thematically consistent ideas could produce its best work yet.

In case you missed it amidst all the Dragon Ball Z business going down in Fortnite right now, Epic and Bungie just kicked off a smaller Destiny 2/Fortnite crossover event that actually extends to both games. In Destiny 2, new armors inspired by Fortnite characters are available now. Over in Fortnite, Destiny skins for Zavala, Ikora, and the Exo Stranger are in the store for 1,500 V-bucks each.

Fortnite also has a new custom game mode that recreates Destiny 2's Zone Control Crucible mode on one of its most iconic maps, Javelin-4, though you'd be forgiven for not realizing the mode exists. I had a tough time finding it on Fortnite's extensive grid of game modes, but keep scrolling and you'll eventually see it under the "Epic's Picks" section.

3a8082e126