I recently sat down to give the Lawbreakers beta a whirl and here’s the gist of it. I had sliced, been sliced, fired rockets, got a boot in the face, chased around an enemy player who was carrying a smart ass talking ball, used an electric rope thingie to swing into walls, bounced around and left clicked a lot... all in the first 5 minutes. Someone get me some decaf...
So all that said, what is Lawbreakers?
Lawbreakers is an arena style shooter made by BossKey Productions (a company co-founded by Cliff Bleszinski AKA CLiffyB). It’s meant to be a stylized high speed bounce off the wall shooter with 4 different game modes. Blitzball has you carrying a sentient ball to the enemies goal to score... which to be honest... was the favorite of the modes for me. The others include Turf War, Overcharge, and Uplink. There are several different roles you can choose from to play like assassin or juggernaut.
The controls felt solid on my PC and the game played fast while looking very nice. But at the end of the day, Lawbreakers felt like it was missing something. It wasn’t until I was talking to a friend that I figured out why. For all the different roles that were in the game, for how different they each felt; it also felt like the different classes didn’t matter much.
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For a team game that has team modes, I felt that whether I was a healer or assassin or juggernaut; that it didn’t make a difference. Oh sure, I could heal the ball carrier to make him live a little longer; but did it really make much of a difference between that or just killing things that were coming after the ball carrier? Would it have made a difference if I was playing with teams that were communicating or friends? Possibly. But just pugging it, it ultimately felt like I could play any role and it means the same thing in the game. Kill or be killed.
Ultimately, while the game feels good and fun, the lack of needing to play different roles puts me off wanting to buy Lawbreakers at this point in time. We'll have more in-depth impressions as it nears its launch in a few weeks.
