With a new season of Apex Legends comes a new legend, and a new legend always shakes up the game’s meta in some form or fashion. Season 13 will feature the introduction of Newcastle, also known as Jackson Williams—Bangalore’s brother.
Despite the relation to Bangalore, Newcastle will feature an entirely different set of abilities. Where Bangalore’s kit features plenty of offensive options, Newcastle will be a defensive legend whose focus is on protecting himself and his squadmates.
With season 13 only a few days away, Apex officially gave players a closer look at Newcastle’s abilities, featuring an array of shields.
Here are all of Newcastle’s abilities in Apex.
Passive ability: Retrieve the Wounded
Newcastle’s passive ability allows him to drag downed teammates faster than they are able to crawl, while simultaneously providing himself and his downed teammate with cover, courtesy of a small personal shield. While he drags teammates, he simultaneously begins reviving them. This means Newcastle is the only character in the game that can move while reviving a squadmate. The arm shield Newcastle uses is based on the knockdown shield he has equipped, meaning equipping a stronger knockdown shield will also give Newcastle’s arm shield while reviving more health.
This passive is extremely useful since teammates downed in the open are frequently sitting ducks for an enemy team to finish off, even if they aren’t particularly close. This passive feels somewhat similar to the shield Lifeline used to deploy when she revived teammates, although Newcastle’s shield is considerably smaller.
Passive ability: Fortified
In addition to Retrieve the Wounded, Newcastle also comes with the Fortified passive. In the current game, this is an extra passive for Gibraltar and Caustic. Fortified reduces damage taken by 15 percent, and characters with the Fortified ability are not slowed by bullets hitting them.
This passive is meant to compensate for bigger character models that are much easier to hit. While it’s still not confirmed that Newcastle will have Fortified, previous leaks of the character, and the fact that his character model is clearly on par with Gibraltar and Caustic in terms of size, make the extra passive likely.
Tactical ability: Mobile Shield
Continuing the theme of protecting his teammates, Newcastle’s tactical ability is the Mobile Shield. While using this ability, Newcastle throws down a drone-like device, creating a shield in front of him.
The Mobile Shield is a tall shield that can provide cover for a couple of legends at a time but is probably too small to give cover to an entire squad. Newcastle can also redirect the shield, changing the direction it faces. This redirection takes a bit of time to actually activate and move, however.
In addition to rotating the shield, Newcastle can move the shield in any direction while the shield is up. The shield will move independently once it is directed and it follows terrain. Bullets and other projectiles cannot penetrate this shield from either side, but they can damage the shield. The Mobile Shield is split into upper and lower sections, and each section can be individually destroyed after taking a certain amount of damage.
Ultimate ability: Castle Wall
Fittingly, the most attack-oriented portion of Newcastle’s kit is also a type of shield, although this shield takes the form of a much larger wall that physically resembles a fortified castle wall. This wall features three taller sections that provide the best cover, and also feature small cut-outs from which legends can fire their weapons, similar to a medieval castle’s arrowslits. Legends can also use the shorter portions of the wall that connect the three tall sections, which provide less cover but more visibility.
While deploying his ultimate, Newcastle leaps forward with impressive range and speed, making the ultimate a decent attacking option if a squad needs to quickly advance into an open area of the map while under fire, or a defensive option if a teammate is about to get hit with a barrage of bullets, ultimate abilities, and anything else the characters of Apex can throw at them.
Castle Wall is a physical construction that can take damage, and not a forcefield-esque shield like Gibraltar’s Dome Shield. The ultimate does seem able to absorb an impressive amount of damage before it’s destroyed, however. Like the Mobile Shield, the Castle Wall has separate sections that can be destroyed individually.
Newcastle leaps into Apex with the beginning of season 13, Saviors, on March 10.
