Apex Legends sends its Season 8 launch trailer out with a bang

Apex Legends has pulled the pin on next month's new season with an explosive new launch trailer.

Respawn's battle royale enters its eighth season, Mayhem, next month. With it comes new hero Fuse, an Aussie punk with a slick moustache and a deep love for golden hand grenades—and while we're still no clearer on how he'll play in action, it seems likely (as leaks suggested) that his ultimate will be a good old fashioned rocket launcher. What the short does do is handily set the table for the carnage preceding the next season of the Apex Games.

We're going back to King's Canyon, giving the game's debut map yet another makeover. This time, it comes courtesy of Fuse's old pal Maggie, crashing his welcome party by doing a right number on the arena—pummelling it with cannons, blowing up a mountain, and then crashing half a bloody spaceship into it for good measure. You'd think Michael Bay had a hand in directing the short with all these explosions.

Alongside a new hero and a remixed map, Season 8 also comes with the game's first lever-action rifle, the 30-30 Repeater. A new season means a new ranked season, plus dozens of new cosmetics to unlock with a fresh new battle pass, the contents of which we'll see closer to the season's start.

All of that arrives alongside Fuse, the 30-30 and King's Canyon's obliterated new look when Season 8: Mayhem finally kicks off on February 2.

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.