Every character shooter from now until the end of time will be compared to Overwatch. Even when the game is old and decrepit, gamers will compare every emo badass to Reaper, every robot to Bastion and every gorilla to Winston. Any game that looks anything like Overwatch needs to find it’s own unique identity or risk getting destroyed by Blizzard’s newest franchise. Nobody even gave Battleborn a chance; it was deemed inferior to Overwatch and currently isn’t doing so hot.
There are a few character shooters still in development, and none of them want the Overwatch kiss of death. Their creators are trying to do everything in their power to make their game stand out. Cliff Bleszinski of Boss Key Productions is working on a new free-to-play shooter called Lawbreakers . Cliffy B wants everyone to know that Overwatch and Lawbreakers may both be shooters, but have very different design aesthetics.
“And there is some overlap in regards to the fact that we have characters and guns and weapons and whatnot, but the thing is that our art style is a little bit more gritty – theirs is kind of, super bright colors, almost anime-ish characters…they’re going for a bazillion different characters, while we’re going initially with less is more, and we’re ramping up to find our balance,” Bleszinski said to Eurogamer.
Bleszinski says that if Overwatch is Street Fighter, Lawbreakers is Mortal Kombat. He used this comparison on the Lawbreakers Pax East stream and also in an interview with Ars Technica. Lawbreakers is a bloody, gruesome game with all the gore you could ever ask for; it’s closer to DOOM than it is to Overwatch .
With other character shooters like Paragon in various stages of development, we are going to see a lot more Overwatch comparisons. Still, competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Blizzard has a stranglehold on the market right now, but in a year Overwatch might start to wane in popularity. I’m addicted to Genji, but who knows if one of Lawbreakers characters will click with me even more.
Lawbreakers is coming to PC and has no official release date, but last weekend they had an Alpha for “friends and family.”
