10 Worst Fortnite Skins You Should Avoid

Whole lotta recon.

Worst Fortnite Skins

Fortnite has been around for quite a few years now, meaning that we’ve seen countless skins make their way into many different Battle Passes and Item Shops. While some have become pop culture characters all their own and basically mascots for the entire game, the worst Fortnite skins are ones that should probably be distanced from the brand as far as possible.

Whether it’s because they’re terrible recolours, a strange clash of styles that simply doesn’t work, or wearing them is actually a hindrance to your gameplay, these skins are ones you should avoid in Fortnite, even less so spend your hard-earned V-Bucks on.

Of course, fashion is objective, especially where Fortnite fashion is concerned. For some, Fishstick is the height of style, while for others, he’s just a weird fish guy. If you’re a fan of any of these worst Fortnite skins, power to you for being a little different and not just rolling with Aura and Crystal or any of the slender female skins, like 90% of the playerbase do these days.

Bear in mind that we won’t be including any of the intentionally bad joke skins like Mancake or the llama guy from Season 7. Likewise, we won’t be including the skin sets with nine million variants, like the zombie soccer and Ghostbusters skins, because they deserve a special kind of list about Fortnite skins that should burn instead.

 

10. Devastator

Fortnite Devastator
Fortnite Devastator

Release Date: December 25th, 2017
Rarity: Uncommon
Price: 800 V-Bucks

Previously one of the rarest skins in the game, and for good reason: nobody should have bought this thing at the time of launch and nobody should when it very rarely arrives back in the Item Shop. It takes one of Fortnite’s best characters and turns them into a weird kind of Jaffa Cake.

A restyle of Jonesy with a cutoff vest and brown hair, there’s nothing about Devastator that is correct. It is all wrong. Not only do the colours on it clash harder than two stags being shot at each other by cannons, but the cutoff vest is a look that we could all do without seeing.

It’s not the Attitude Era of WWE. Pack it in.

 

9. Tower Recon Specialist

Fortnite Tower Recon specialist
Fortnite Tower Recon specialist

Release Date: February 23rd, 2018
Rarity: Uncommon
Price: 800 V-Bucks

Truthfully, there’s a lot of lazy restyles we could have included here, but Tower Recon Specialist is just another level. In Battle Royale’s earliest days, most of the skins were lazy restyles of the defaults and Tower Recon Specialist is among the worst offenders.

It’s basically just like someone’s trying on slightly different coloured clothes so they can prove that they don’t always wear the same ones. That’s it. Tower Recon Specialist is one of the rarest skins in the game, and it should really stay that way — you’re being absolutely robbed if you’re spending your V-Bucks on this skin.

Plus, those eyes. There’s something deeply wrong with this model. What has she seen? What has she lived through?

 

8. Gingerbread Raider

Gingerbread Raider Fortnite
Gingerbread Raider Fortnite

Release Date: December 12th, 2020
Rarity: Rare
Price: 1,200 V-Bucks

Design-wise, there’s nothing really all that wrong with Gingerbread Raider as a skin in Fortnite at all. It makes the “cut” here because it’s pretty much everything wrong with Epic’s thinking over the course of Chapter 2.

A restyle of Renegade Raider, who had already been restyled for the Blaze skin, Gingerbread Raider is just two of Fortnite’s most popular skins mashed into one. It’s pretty uninspired at best, cynical at worst and a way to get around them saying they would never bring Battle Pass skins to the Item Shop.

Alongside the likes of Summer Drift, Party Trooper, and the nine million Brite Bomber variants, Gingerbread Raider is proof that Epic play it safe when it comes to skins and now everything is just iterative of something else. It must work for them, though, as people just keep buying them.

 

7. Patch Patroller

Patch Patroller Fortnite
Patch Patroller Fortnite

Release Date: October 29th, 2018
Rarity: Uncommon
Price: 800 V-Bucks

Patch patroller is a pretty old skin in Fortnite, meaning we’ve had years and years to try and figure it out. Trouble is: we still can’t. He looks like some kind of pumpkin superhero, like if Welyn had rolled around in radioactive waste and decided to guard pumpkin patches across the land.

Orange and black doesn’t go together at the best of times, but then you have all the random vines coming out of different places and, perhaps worst of all, trousers that wouldn’t be out of place in a 90s ska band.

If you ever encounter a Patch Patroller out in the wild, good chance they’re an absolute maniac. Steer well clear, or at least try to find some pesticide.

 

6. Mincemeat

Mincemeat Fortnite
Mincemeat Fortnite

Release Date: November 25th, 2020
Rarity: Epic
Price: 1,500 V-Bucks

Is this Silent Hill or Fortnite? Who allowed this to happen? Did Epic at least start a prayer circle before they conjured this thing from the deepest depths? Its back bling is literally him stirring himself.

Mincemeat is intended to be a joke skin, which should kind of discount it from being included here. However, as a sentient pie with legs is one of the most disturbing things we’ve ever seen, Mincemeat has got to be included, if not for the sake of some of Fortnite’s younger players.

The smell of a good pie should lure people in. However, if you smell any pie in the future, you should probably turn in the opposite direction and just start sprinting.

 

5. Sea Wolf

Sea Wolf Fortnite
Sea Wolf Fortnite

Release Date: April 10th, 2019
Rarity: Rare
Price: 1,200 V-Bucks

For this skin, Epic must have gone on Amazon, searched “pirate costume for Halloween” and then sorted by price low to high. It’s just about the most basic skin you could possibly design, like someone’s impression of Jack Sparrow who’d only ever seen a photo of him that had been smeared in mayonnaise.

What makes the skin worse is that it released in a pirate-themed season with many more exciting pirate and swashbuckler skins that were even included as part of the Battle Pass. Season 8 saw a tonne of great skins make their way into Fortnite, but Sea Wolf is not among them.

If this bargain bin skin ever comes back to Fortnite after almost a year away at this time of writing, do us a favour and save your money. Savvy?

 

4. Hedron/Iso (Edge Factor set)

Hedron Fortnite skin
Hedron Fortnite skin

Release Date: January 7th, 2021
Rarity: Epic
Price: 1,500 V-Bucks

The skins that actually inspired us to put this list together, we were left a little bit amazed by the positive reception that the Edge Factor set received when it released in 2021. They’re shapes. You are paying for shapes.

Seriously, these two skins look like they are CGI stand-ins for some Marvel movie, like Prince made his way into Superhot. They are absolutely, objectively terrible and also proof that will buy anything that might even remotely be sweaty.

Utterly featureless and bland, it feels like Epic have really pulled a fast one with these skins, so much so that we think they were released unfinished. They couldn’t have even given these Tron wannabes a pair of googly eyes or something.

 

3. Radiant Striker

Radiant Striker
Radiant Striker

Release Date: March 14th, 2018
Rarity: Rare
Price: 1,200 V-Bucks

Radiant Striker hasn’t been seen in Fortnite for almost two years at this time of writing, it last turning up in the Item Shop way back in 2018. Let’s hope Epic keep it that way as this is one of those skins that just gets worse the longer you look at it.

Whether it’s the fact that it doesn’t make sense when paired with Brilliant Striker but isn’t anything to do with football or that it dares to try and mix red and purple, Radiant Striker is a seriously unsettling skin that just isn’t good for the eyeballs.

Also doesn’t help that it looks a lot like some of kind of special edition military food ration for Christmas.

 

2. Pillar

Pillar Fortnite
Pillar Fortnite

Release Date: July 14th, 2019
Rarity: Rare
Price: 1,200 V-Bucks

The physical embodiment of a confused scream, Pillar is half a joke skin and half someone’s walking nightmare, so we feel pretty comfortable about including it as one of the worst skins in Fortnite.

Appearing in the Fortnite Item Shop just twice since release, which is, by the way, 59 times fewer than Brite Bomber has been re-released, Pillar is a truly bewildering Fortnite skin that’s basically a human caterpillar squaring up to you and asking you if you want go a couple rounds.

This demented Power Rangers skin is a pretty weird concept that doesn’t really come off and is pretty weak overall, but at least it’s more inspired by the absolute worst skin in Fortnite overall.

 

1. Recon Expert

Recon Expert Fortnite
Recon Expert Fortnite

Release Date: October 30th, 2017
Rarity: Rare
Price: 1,200 V-Bucks

If you picked up Recon Expert after it finally returned to the Item Shop after 1000 days, you were hoodwinked, grifted, gazumped. It is a plain skin that nobody bought in the first place because it is so unremarkable, hence why Epic never bothered to bring it back for so long.

Recon Expert’s entire desirability was invented by the weird OG culture around Fortnite, where even the worst of skins can become desirable as long as they are hard to come across, or some sweaty YouTuber rocks them when few people do. It’s just a default restyle with a bucket hat. If you want bucket hats, just watch an old Oasis concert.

Compared to Skull Trooper and even the Travis Scott skin that’s currently everyone’s most in-demand skin, just about the only reason to get Recon Expert is to have the pretense of being some kind of veteran player. If you’re a Recon Expert owner, ask yourself this: how many times have you worn the skin since it was re-released?

For being symptomatic of everything wrong with the clout-chasing, empty-brained nature of modern Fortnite skin culture, Recon Expert is easily the worst skin across the whole game. Be a real expert and don’t throw money at stupid stuff like this.

Fortnite is free-to-play on PC via the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X | S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Android.

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