Apex Legends’ maps are one of the many aspects that set it apart from other battle royales. Besides giving players interesting worlds to explore and battlegrounds to compete in, they’re essential vehicles for lore updates, hints at future events, and limited-time modes, all of which make the world of Apex feel like a living, breathing thing.
At time of writing, Apex‘s battle royale mode has four maps: Kings Canyon, World’s Edge, Olympus, and Storm Point. All four of these maps are sprawling locales that include plenty of room for squads to fight and loot their way to first place. All four maps have received updates since their release, which help to keep them interesting and ever-changing. While each map has its highs and lows—literally—we’re taking a look at how they all stack up against each other.
Here are all Apex’s battle royale maps, ranked.
4) Storm Point
Storm Point is Apex’s most recently introduced map: it arrived in season 11 alongside Ash. It’s the game’s largest map by sheer surface area, and it includes a huge amount of verticality, giving movement legends a chance to shine. It also features several PvE battles that offer loot tailored to those who take on their (not-so-) significant challenge, allowing opportunistic players to loot up quickly. Its tall structures and long sight lines make it a sniper’s paradise.
Unfortunately, Storm Point’s most prominent features are also its biggest drawbacks. The map is often too big for its own good: players generally have to travel for a long time before they come across an enemy squad, and racing the new, more damaging ring can sometimes punish squads who land on Storm Point’s fringes. Getting to the top of POIs and their structures can be troublesome if you aren’t playing a character who has powerful movement abilities, with snipers often adding insult to injury to those non-movement legends.
Storm Point’s POIs are larger and more spread out than many of the POIs on other maps. While this does help the map blend together more seamlessly, it can be difficult to tell where a POI begins and ends. Travel between points is often aided by the map’s gravity cannons, which offer less in-air movement for those who use them and make it more difficult for players on the ground to shoot them when compared to, say, Olympus’ jump towers.
Storm Point appears to be an experiment on the part of the Apex development team, and it’s always great to see them try new things. It’s also worth mentioning that as the newest map, Storm Point hasn’t received as many updates and tweaks as the other maps, so it will almost certainly change significantly in future seasons. Until then, its relative unfriendliness as compared to other maps puts it at the bottom of our list.
3) World’s Edge
World’s Edge was Apex‘s second map. Introduced in season three, it brought entirely new biomes to the game, like the icy remnants of The Epicenter and the lava-strewn paths of The Dome. Lore-wise, World’s Edge is focused around the company Hammond and its mining operation, which over the course of several seasons destroyed the map and brought its ecosystem to the brink of destruction.
World’s Edge offers one of the highest amounts of visual variety on any map, which makes it feel as though you’re traversing an entire planet without actually traversing an entire planet. (Looking at you, Storm Point.) It’s the game’s second-largest map, but it rarely feels so large that rotations are a chore, and you’ll almost always come across someone else while outrunning the ring. In this way, the map is paced very well.
But it still has its shortcomings. One of the most prominent is Fragment, a large POI split into East and West segments. Fragment has long been known as a popular hot drop location despite its relatively poor loot and the high likelihood of death upon landing. While developer Respawn seemingly nerfed the loot in both halves of the POI a few seasons ago, it’s done little to discourage squads from landing there. Fragment will likely always be a point of contention for players.
World’s Edge also suffers from a strange loot distribution. Despite its visual prominence, The Epicenter has never been a good place to land if you want to loot right away; as previously mentioned, Fragment doesn’t have great loot, either. If you go too far in any direction on the map, the loot thins out and it becomes less interesting on the whole.
The high concentration of powerful loot at Rampart’s Big Maude town takeover has helped somewhat, but the map could probably do with an adjustment in loot location and rarity. World’s Edge is a fun map that’s come a long way since its introduction, but it could probably use a few more changes.
2) Kings Canyon
It’s hard to go wrong with the original. Kings Canyon is the map that Apex launched with, and as such, it’s been changed a huge amount of times since that very first season. Players have witnessed the destruction of Skull Town, a POI rivaled only by Fragment for its ability to provoke hot drops, the crashing of a ship that accompanied Fuse’s introduction into the Apex Games, and the rise of Relic, a POI that blends the old with the new.
In season 14, the map received a wide-ranging update called Reforged that adjusted just about everything on it. Reforged added land mass to the map, making it feel less small in comparison to other maps. It also opened up new rotation potential to prevent frequent third-parties, which was previously a major complaint from players; the map’s cliff-like interior was adjusted for the same reason. Finally, Reforged redistributed the map’s loot, making the looting process feel more fair and encouraging players to visit POIs that they hadn’t dropped on in a while.
Thanks to these changes, Kings Canyon has held up incredibly well since launch. Even so, it can still be somewhat troublesome to play on. Certain POIs, The Cage foremost among them, encourage bunkering up on the high ground and sniping for miles, which can be difficult to play against. Relic isn’t quite as fun as the old Skull Town, and it hasn’t become as much of a hot drop magnet as its predecessor, though that’s probably a good thing.
Despite the changes to the map’s rotation paths, third parties are still an issue. Players often complain about how their kills are frequently stolen out from underneath them or their fights are intruded on by a squad that ends up wiping everyone. Even so, Kings Canyon is much better than it used to be. It now feels like an example of how old maps can be brought into the present with smart design changes that make things feel fresh, even for players who’ve been playing since the preseason.
1) Olympus
Olympus is undoubtedly the game’s best battle royale map. Introduced in season seven and updated several times since then, it’s a versatile, visually interesting map with an extremely high level of polish. It offers a lot of rotation paths and movement potential thanks to its Trident vehicles and jump towers, neither of which exclude non-movement legends.
One of Olympus’ biggest strengths is that it doesn’t have an overpicked hot drop location like World’s Edge, meaning that players are more likely to be spread out throughout the map when a match begins. It also has a variety of high walls that allow for long sightlines but do a good job at preventing third parties. The map’s mechanical and organic architecture flow together extremely well, creating a cohesive whole rather than a collection of connected POIs.
Olympus provides a huge amount of ways to approach battle royale. Want to get great loot immediately without being swarmed? Drop at Docks and head for the high-tier loot bin in the back. Do you prefer to fight early and snag good loot at the same time? Estates and Energy Depot are for you. Looking to take long shots across the map’s long green expanses? Solar Array has plenty of sniper gear. The map supports almost all playstyles and preferred experiences.
No map is without flaws, and Olympus is no exception. Turbine is a troublesome choke point that acts as the de facto rotation route for most of the northwest quadrant of the map, and it’s generally full of third parties. Some of its less-visited POIs, like Orbital Cannon and Carrier, could use a little boost to incentivize players to land there. The area around Hammond Labs is so open that it’s generally impossible not to get sniped while running through there, which can make for a frustrating experience.
These quibbles aside, Olympus is still the best of the pack. It remains to be seen what will come of any future battle royale maps, but until then, if you’re looking for the best battle royale experience Apex has to offer, we recommend waiting for Olympus to come up in the map rotation.
