Author: Trafficblast

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At the start of Season 3: Meltdown, Tae Joon “Crypto” Park was added to Apex Legends as the eleventh playable character. Like Season 1’s Octane and Season 2’s Wattson, you’ll need to drop 750 Apex Coins or 12,000 Legend Tokens to unlock him.

In the following guide, we detail all of Crypto’s unique abilities and how to best use them to counter other characters or shore up holes in your own squad’s defenses. If Season 3 is your introduction to Apex Legends, don’t worry–the new character, map, and gameplay changes make the battle royale very welcoming to newcomers. Below, you’ll find the rest of our character guides, giving you all the information you need to get started with the Legend of your choice.

Other Character Guides

Crypto’s General Overview

Crypto is Apex Legends’ second recon character. In this regard, his role on the battlefield is similar to Bloodhound: hunt down and identify enemies. However, unlike Bloodhound, who’s an aggressive tracker that seeks out squads to kill, Crypto places less emphasis on being on the frontline, as he’s better suited at finding enemies while remaining hidden.

Rarely does Crypto excel at spearheading his squad’s offensive. If you want to play as Crypto, you’re typically going to fulfill a support role, aiding your teammates in increasing their kill counts. Unlike most of the other Legends, Crypto does not possess an ability that allows him to easily escape a fight. As such, you need to ensure firefights are already stacked in your squad’s favor before you engage. Once you emerge from hiding and join the fray, you have to commit.

Crypto’s Abilities

Tactical Ability: Surveillance Drone – Deploy an aerial drone that allows you to view the surrounding area from above.

Crypto’s drone has a variety of uses. It can open and close doors, crack open loot bins, and retrieve fallen teammate’s respawn beacons. Point the drone’s camera at any of the Champion Squad banners throughout the arena and it will show you how many squads are in your immediate vicinity. Crypto can only summon one drone at a time, but he’s got an unlimited supply. Once the drone is destroyed, however, there’s a 40-second cooldown before he can summon another one.

Passive Ability: Neurolink – Enemies detected by the Surveillance Drone within 30 meters of your position are marked for you and your teammates to see.

Though you can tag enemies with your drone, marking them with Neurolink is what best helps your squad. Doing so highlights the enemy for your entire team, allowing allies to see targets through walls or smoke.

Ultimate Ability: Drone EMP – Your Surveillance Drone sets off an EMP blast that deals shield damage, slows enemies, and disables traps.

Crypto’s ultimate ability does 50 shield damage–outright destroying white body armor–and slows all enemies with an effect similar to Wattson’s Perimeter Security fences. Like other Legends, Crypto is affected by his own ultimate ability, so make sure you’re not in the blast zone when you activate the Drone EMP. The EMP blast is not limited by terrain, allowing you to use the attack as a bunker buster to hit a team hiding in a building.

Tips To Play As Crypto

Crypto is the only Legend to have his passive and ultimate ability tied to his tactical. This limits what you can do with him–every ability has to be done through your drone. Thus, mastering how to maneuver the drone to dodge enemy shots or weave among obstacles should be your first priority. Once your drone is destroyed you have to wait almost a full minute to use it again, and you won’t have access to any abilities until then. Keep your drone alive, only sacrificing it as a means to distract foes so your squad can retreat.

Though his abilities would suggest a long-range approach, Crypto is actually at his best in mid-range combat. Equipping a mid-range scope on the G7-Scout, R-301, Peacekeeper, or new Charge Rifle gives Crypto the ability to deal damage quickly from a slight distance. When a battle starts, you’re best bet is to find cover and send your drone skyward. Be careful, as Crypto can’t move while using his drone. Put your drone behind the attacking squad so they’re sandwiched between it and you. That way, if they want to destroy it, they’ll have to turn their back on you. Exit the drone, leave your hiding spot, and begin your attack. Even if the enemy hides behind cover, you and your squad will still be able to see them thanks to Neurolink. As you continue to shoot the opposition, your squadmates should rush to overwhelm the enemy.

If Drone EMP is ready to go, all the better. Follow the strategy above but use the ability as you’re exiting drone view and beginning your assault. The enemy team will then have to turn their backs on you to shoot down the drone and stop the EMP, or they’ll have to respond to your attack and take shield damage and be too stunned to run away. Either way, the odds will turn in your favor. You may want to save your EMP if the match is almost over, though. Given its ability to disable traps, Crypto can ruin an entire team’s defense in the final circle–disabling Caustic’s Nox Gas Traps and Wattson’s Perimeter Security and Interception Pylon. Plus the enemy team will take shield damage and be stunned.

When your allies are down, let your drone do the heavy lifting for you–especially if your teammate’s banner is outside the safe zone. The drone takes no damage from being outside the zone, allowing you to safely pick up your teammate’s respawn banner.

How To Mitigate Crypto’s Weaknesses

Because of how dependent Crypto is on his drone, his main weakness is actually just going up against someone who’s a good shot. The drone has one HP, so any attack from any gun, grenade, or ability will destroy it. You can’t really be sneaky with the drone either. Not only does it make a ton of noise, but enemies are alerted to when Neurolink has marked them. However, there are a few things you can do to hide your drone and make it more difficult to destroy.

Bangalore, Caustic, Lifeline, and Gibraltar can all hide the drone with their abilities. Bangalore’s Smoke Launcher and Caustic’s Nox Gas Traps create a smokescreen that hides the drone if you’re in an enclosed space, and positioning your drone behind a Lifeline’s Combat Medic shield gives you just enough time to mark enemies before the forcefield goes down. Even after the drone has been destroyed, Neurolink lasts a few seconds, giving you time to emerge from cover and fire on the enemy. Gibraltar’s Dome Shield provides a longer solution of the same strategy.

The Legend that best counters Crypto is Bloodhound, as the technological tracker can sniff out the hacker’s hiding spot while he’s piloting the drone and unaware of his surroundings. There’s no way to directly counter this yourself. You’ll just have to trust your team to watch your back. If you don’t, we suggest exiting your drone view the second you spot a Bloodhound, unless you’re very confident that you’ll get the drop on them before they get the drop on you.

A huge amount of content dropped into Apex Legends at the start of Season 3: Meltdown, including a brand-new map, World’s Edge. Kings Canyon has (at least temporarily) been removed from the battle royale, forcing all players to land on the new battlefield, which is great, because it makes Apex Legends exciting again.

Despite featuring the same number of major landmarks, World’s Edge feels a lot bigger, stretching across three distinct, interconnected areas. Most of the northern part of the map is covered in ice, the result of a factory accident gone horribly wrong, while the south is dominated by volcanoes and lava pits. Both areas include small settlements and leftover dig sites from the miners that once frequented the planet. Snaking between both regions are pockets of civilization–mostly major cities and transport hubs–with a moving train connecting all of them.

Large, imposing cliffs are also sprinkled throughout the map, many too tall to climb for certain characters. The unfamiliar terrain gives an added utility to new character Crypto, whose drone makes it easier to scout ahead and plan where to go next. To get around these roadblocks without him, you need to scout through tunnels that have been carved into the landscape and take ziplines that criss-cross at numerous points. Jump towers populate the map for easy redeployment, and you can use the environment to your advantage as well–leaping into geyser spouts propel you high enough into the sky to glide to a new location, for example.

At a glance, you can tell that everything’s different, presenting a more even playing field for newcomers that join at the start of Season 3, as they don’t have to worry about Apex Legends veterans knowing the map’s layout like the back of their hand (for now). Granted, there are influences of Kings Canyon throughout World’s Edge–the Overlook location, for example, is just a smaller variation of Kings Canyon’s cliffside Airbase–but the new map is just too wholly different from Apex Legends’ first one to consider them different sides of the same coin. And World’s Edge is a good map because it’s so different.

World’s Edge’s greatest strength is that it forces you to adopt new strategies for playing Apex Legends. After a pre-season and two whole seasons on Kings Canyon, I’d grown intimately familiar with every aspect of the map. I had my favorite spots, but I could go anywhere and comfortably know I’d be able to hold my own. No matter the location, I had strategies for looting it, fighting in it, and effectively escaping it. And, as a result, I could feel myself settling into familiar tactics and habits.

The same can’t be said for World’s Edge. The map seems designed to encourage long-distance duels, not close-quarters firefights like on Kings Canyon–in fact, the sheer distance between locations means you can easily go an entire match without running into another squad until the final circle. Snipers were rarely too big of a threat on Kings Canyon; if someone had a lock on you, a safe hiding place was never too far away. But on World’s Edge, getting caught out in the open can easily be a death sentence.

Which isn’t to say World’s Edge is unfairly balanced. Quite the opposite actually; the new map is designed with the same careful attention to detail as Kings Canyon. Despite the longer distance between landmarks, World’s Edge is almost completely interconnected. As opposed to solely relying on clearly marked paths on the ground, though, World’s Edge also puts those aforementioned underground tunnels and ziplines to use. Getting the drop on enemies from above by hopping from one zipline to the next, or coming up behind them from below presents satisfying ways to navigate to the next fight. Multileveled environments, like Capitol City and Sorting Factory, further emphasize verticality.

This added emphasis is certainly different from the horizontally-focused Kings Canyon, which prioritized having good spots to bunker down, so it’s a bit understandable as to why many veteran players dislike the new map. But World’s Edge encourages you to keep moving even if that’s not the strategy most Apex Legends players are used to. Most of the tunnels are wide at the ends but narrow in the middle, for instance, funneling you forward to get past a confined space. There aren’t many piles of high-tier loot outside the golden vaults either, so your squad has to stay on the move to gather the weapons, gear, and supplies necessary to survive. You can’t expect to land and find everything you need immediately.

Admittedly, there are certain areas I dislike in World’s Edge. Anytime a teammate tags The Dome, Skyhook, Refinery, or The Epicenter as a drop spot, I grow apprehensive. But that uncomfortable feeling, one created because I don’t know those locations very well, is why having a new map is exciting–it makes Apex Legends feel fresh again. I do want to return to Kings Canyon and meet the twelfth Legend but, for now anyway, World’s Edge is what Respawn’s battle royale needs.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is a massive game packed with tons of systems and mechanics. It’s a lot to take in all at once, so we don’t blame you if you skipped past Maria’s shop tutorials–which is easy to do early on. As a result, you’re likely to become confused about her most crucial tutorial: how blueprints work.

As you can imagine, not all guns and attachments can be bought at Maria’s shop or even found organically in the world. Instead, you need to search for their blueprints. These investigative mini-quests have you traveling all around Aurora island to secure the ability to purchase some of the game’s better, more powerful guns.

You can generally find blueprints in special chests scattered across Aurora’s various bases and residential districts. But if you’re having trouble, you can clue in on their location by interacting with intel points.

Once you’ve acquired a weapon or attachment blueprint, you can then buy it at Maria’s shop. It’s as easy as that. There’s no crafting involved–all you need is your hard-earned Skell credits. But don’t fret, they’re just as affordable as the other guns in Maria’s shop. If you grow partial to a particular weapon, though, you’re welcome to re-purchase it with stats adjusted to your current level.

For more Ghost Recon Breakpoint, check out our spoiler-free beginner’s guide. Be sure to check back often in the coming days as we publish even more guides. For everything else Breakpoint-related, read our feature rounding up everything you need to know.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is available now for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can read our most significant thoughts of the full game so far in our early review impressions.

Pick Up Organic Resources To Make Rations

Preparations offer the longest-lasting character buffs, but you can also stack one more on top by eating Rations, which provide similar buffs but in shorter durations. That’s right, you can totally stack a one-hour +40 Injury Resistance buff with a 10-minute +5% Damage Resistance buff, or you can boost it further by consuming a Ration with the same Injury Resistance buff.

Rations are crafted from organic resources in the environment, so you’ll want to hunt down some plants, fruits, and meats from the world first. As a general practice, always make it a point to gather these resources as you’re exploring. Once you’ve got what you need, set up shop at a Bivouac, select the Craft option, and tab over to the Rations menu to start cooking up some buffs. You can even gather these resources in Ghost War, the PvP mode in Breakpoint.