Hot pants? What is that, some kind of hipster lingo for cum in my pants? I'll have you know that I'm always rocking a set of hot pants.

Yeah, circle closing is basically the "storm/ring" closing in to force you into smaller and smaller spaces to fight. Towards the end of the game you can survive in it for, like, 2-3 seconds.

That's fair, it's not everyone's cup of piss or anything. My teenage years were mostly all FPS games, and it's just a genre that I particularity enjoy as long as it's done well. Apex has great pacing and good mechanics, they just take too long to do updates to the game which is an issue.