Movement is one of the core components of Apex Legends, a vital facet of what makes the game so fun. Slide jumping, wall bouncing, tap-strafing—there always seems to be a new movement technique to learn and perfect that can send players zooming around the maps of Apex just a bit faster.
Players discovered yet another new movement tech over the last several days. Forget going “a bit faster.” Try “going almost as fast as being shot out of a gravity cannon.” If executed properly, punch-boosting will bring you to that speed.
Found by wrthcrw and amplified by MokeySniper, the actual inputs to achieve the punch boost are simple. Slide down a hill, turn around while still holding “S” or down on an analog stick to maintain the speed of the slide, and punch to your heart’s content. It’s hard to tell just what the limits of this technique are as of yet, but players have already more than tripled the speed of one of a super glide by punch boosting.
As wrthcrw explains, the technique isn’t very different from the tech that allows players to launch themselves backward off of an Octane pad. Crouching and meleeing any surface higher than the player will send them backward. Doing it while at speed (for instance, when sliding down a big hill) seems to calculate the player’s original speed at the point of melee contact and still attempts to launch them backward even while the player is moving in that direction, resulting in the massive speed boost.
Using the steep, long slopes of Storm Point, players can increase their speed to an astounding degree by using melee on the slope behind them while sliding. Though this can be used on any long hill, Storm Point’s verticality makes the map an ideal candidate for players to achieve maximum velocity.
This is almost certainly an unintentional addition to the game, similar to tap-strafing. While developers have gone back and forth about the removal of tap-strafing, punch-boosting’s days could be numbered. The speeds players can achieve just by sliding down a hill are simply too fast. If a team is at the bottom of a large hill, punch-boosting can put an enemy squad on top of them faster than almost any ultimate in the game. The tech avoids the arguments for exclusivity via input that Respawn has previously mentioned as a reason to remove tap-strafing, but the value of covering that much ground that quickly is simply too high.
In the meantime, however, there’s a new way to slide and glide around the Apex Games. Just try not to get too attached to it.
