Apex Legends Mobile Season 2: Distortion has launched this week, bringing Kings Canyon to our phones for the first time. Skull Town’s back too, if you’re pining for the busiest POI in Apex Legends history (yes, I’m including Fragment East). The most exciting addition is the second exclusive Legend to hit the mobile version of Apex, Rhapsody.
Rhapsody is a superstar DJ who is helped by her little drone Rowdy. As a brief aside, when are we getting Drone Legends? I’d pay good money to see Rowdy team up with D.O.C. and Newt and work their way through a battle royale match. Anyway, Rowdy is the amplifier for Rhapsody’s banging mixes, and also forms the core of her abilities in Apex Mobile matches. It’s these abilities that make her such an interesting addition to the Apex Games, as at first glance they seem to be a solid counter for the current meta.
Her Passive allows her to hear opponents from further away. How well this will work remains to be seen, as Apex has well-documented issues with its audio and players can easily sneak up on you undetected, footsteps completely absent in lieu of ambient noise. Rhapsody’s Tactical seems a bit like a toned-down version of Wattson’s Ultimate, recharging teammates’ shields and giving them a speed boost until you next take damage. Her Ultimate, Rowdy’s Rave, is the most important though. “Rowdy projects a wall of flashing lights that blocks incoming sight and scans.”
Apex Legends is firmly in a wallhack meta. Seer’s popularity has risen, the ambush artist rising through the ranks to replace Bloodhound as the scanning flavour of the month. Valkyrie’s near-100 percent pick rate in the ALGS has bumped her popularity up even further, although her scans could hardly be counted as wallhacks as they only highlight enemies in your line of sight. Mad Maggie and Fuse both have scanning abilities in their respective arsenals, despite being niche picks, and although Crypto is desperately in need of a buff, he saw some use in the ALGS Championship. Put simply, over a quarter of the Legends have some kind of scanning ability, and Rhapsody seems like the perfect counter.
The issue is, she’s a Mobile exclusive Legend. While Respawn hasn't confirmed that Mobile Legends will remain exclusive to Apex Mobile forever, for the time being she won’t be heading to your PC or console. And Apex Mobile has a very different meta, one that her skillset is arguably less suited to. Apex Mobile has just 12 Legends at present, and only Bloodhound has the ability to scan.
Maybe more of the main game Legends are coming to mobile – Loba has already made the move across during Season 1 – and Rhapsody’s abilities will become more useful as the likes of Seer and Crypto arrive. But for the time being, her great Ultimate ability seems pretty useless. She’s a counter to Bloodhound, and Bloodhound alone. Maybe her Tactical gives her some use as a defensive Legend, a pseudo-Wattson before Ms. Paquette joins Apex Mobile, but she’s inferior to both Caustic and Gibraltar in this respect.
The ability to shield your team from scans – albeit in a characteristically loud and obnoxious manner, with a huge pink shield forming in front of you – would make Rhapsody a great addition to Apex Legends, and it would have been interesting to see how she shook up the scanning meta. It’s a shame her abilities are wasted in Apex Mobile.