Apex Legends Catalyst is coming for the scan meta's throat

The newest Apex Legends character Catalyst is a defensive legend whose abilities make use of the alien-looking ferrofluid to trap, damage, and wall off enemies. If you're a fan of mid to long-range combat or prefer to lock down areas and limit where you can get attacked from, Catalyst may be your new favorite Legend. She drops with Apex Legends Season 15 Eclipse, along with a new map, Broken Moon.

The Apex Legends team on making Catalyst "inescapably trans" and proud

Catalyst's abilities are laid out in the latest Apex Legends vignette, and they're all about the mysterious ferrofluid (which actually exists IRL). Her passive ability is Barricade, which allows her to reinforce or rebuild doors with ferrofluid, forcing enemies to have to break them down in order to escape. "The doors that she reinforces take twice as long to destroy with melee, and can only be opened by Catalyst and her teammates," game design OT Harrison explains during our media preview.

Her tactical, Piercing Spikes, throws out a patch of ferrofluid onto the ground, which will turn into spikes when enemies draw near it, damaging and slowing them down. The spikes have a core that you can shoot in order to deactivate them, but Respawn tells us during a media preview that you can't do this from far away - so sniping it won't work.

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Catalyst's ultimate is Dark Veil, a massively high wall of ferrofluid that she conjures up. The wall is permeable, so you can shoot/walk/drive through it, but moving through it will slow you down and temporarily partially blind you. The wall blocks Seer's tactical and passive, as well as Bloodhound's tactical, so the scan meta may be drastically changing with Apex Legends Season 15.

Apex Legends Eclipse launches on November 1 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch.

Apex Legends studio recently spoke out against "increased harassment" toward devs.

Alyssa Mercante used to be a features writer at GamesRadar+ and is now a freelance writer and editor. Prior to entering the industry, she got her Masters's degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University with a dissertation focusing on contemporary indie games. She spends most of her time playing competitive shooters and in-depth RPGs and was recently on a PAX Panel about the best bars in video games. In her spare time Alyssa rescues cats, practices her Italian, and plays soccer.