I love Catalyst a lot, and it very well could be the recency bias talking, but she's my favorite of the new playable characters added to Apex Legends during the battle royale's fourth year. The ferrofluid-wielding defender isn't a force to be reckoned with--Catalyst won't be breaking the competitive meta anytime soon--and her story hasn't posed any groundbreaking lore ramifications yet. But none of that matters when Catalyst plays a lot like the legends added in Year 3, all of whom celebrate the best part of Titanfall 2's legacy: A first-person shooter doesn't have to make practical sense to be a whole lot of chaotic and joyful fun.

Added in Apex Legends Season 15, Catalyst doesn't have especially powerful abilities, but they certainly seem so with all the visual flair assigned to her kit. And all those flashy skills have one thing in common: They allow Catalyst to be an absolute menace when it comes to opening and closing doors. This may seem dumb and unimportant, and if Catalyst were a playable character in any other hero shooter, it probably would be. But Apex Legends is different--it has the best door technology I've ever seen in any video game to date. Adding a character who can mess with a system that's that consistent has a lot of fun potential.

To better understand what I mean, let's talk about Apex Legends' doors for a second. I want you to think about doors in video games. How do most of them work? Honestly, they don't. There are a lot of doors that simply signify the moment when the game takes control away from you and sees you move to the next area via a short cutscene, some are a loading screen between areas, or they're not even there and the game uses empty entryways. In the cases where doors are allowed to be doors, there are usually only two states to the door--open or closed--and the door cannot be interacted with beyond moving it between those two states.