LawBreakers, the new first-person shooter from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski, is still in its early stages of development, but already plays like it’s nearing release. I had the opportunity to get my hands on the upcoming multiplayer shooter at a press event, and while there are still rough edges, things are looking good.
It should be noted right away that what I played represented gameplay from the pre-alpha build of LawBreakers. This means that, while providing a base gameplay experience, what I played was nowhere near complete. Boss Key Productions is still hard at work on LawBreakers, so do not treat this as a final review.
At the press event, players were divided into teams of five and sat down at a computer station. While we had five players on a team, there were only four roles to pick from. These roles define your character and play style. There’s a melee-based character that is fast, but has low health. There’s the heavy, with big weapons, lots of health, and slow speed. The more generic soldier and the high-flying utility role round out the other classes to pick. More roles are said to be coming, but I didn’t get to try any of them out.
During our game time, we were only treated to one map and one game type. The game was a unique take on Capture The Flag, with teams fighting over control of a battery. Once a team secures the battery in their base, the battery starts charging. The other team can then go into the base and steal the battery to charge in their base. Once the battery gets up to 100% charge, a team has to hold the battery for 20 seconds before they score a point. The first team to two points wins the round.
This led to incredibly tense moments that ended up feeling like a rugby match. One player would successfully steal the bomb, and the four other teammates would swarm the player for protection. Teams would fight and run back to the other side of the map to take the bomb back. Once fully charged, those last 20 seconds end up taking FOREVER, simply because you feel so engaged in the action.
There are many smart design choices to be found in LawBreakers. Health does not regenerate like many other shooters, and there aren’t pick-ups to increase your health. The only way to heal is to go to one of a few heal stations on the map, and stand there to gain life. This added another layer of tension to the action, as you found yourself weighing the benefits of gaining more life versus the punishment of not helping your team.
The user interface is another example of thoughtful design. To keep the screen relatively clear, Boss Key has hidden many traditional UI elements away. Players cannot see enemy health bars, for example. A smart way around this is a weapon’s cross-hairs. The more an enemy is damaged, the more filled a player’s cross-hairs will be. This shows how much health enemies have left without overwhelming the senses with too much information on the screen.
Of course, it’s hard to really say how I felt about the game since I only got a small slice of what it’s like. The one map we played on was nice, but it felt like large parts of it were never used. Players all tended to focus on the middle areas with the side lanes getting ignored in every match I played.
Gravity, despite being one of the major selling points for LawBreakers, was underwhelming. LawBreakers has been promoted as this game with players floating all over and manipulating gravity at a moment’s notice to get the upper hand. Only one role had the ability to affect gravity at all, and that was only for a limited time. There was a big gravitational rift in the middle of the map, but that served more as a hindrance than anything. I found myself making routes to avoid the gravitational field because it slowed me down so much.
Probably the biggest problem right now is being able to tell what’s going on. Normally, online shooters have each team represented by a color. In LawBreakers, roles were represented by color. So instead of a game where team red is fighting team blue, it was team “one red guy, two blue guys and a yellow guy” versus team “three yellow guys, a green guy and a red guy.” Thankfully, Boss Key is aware of how hard it is to tell who is on what team, and this will be reworked before release.
I had fun with LawBreakers, and it’s still too early to be too critical of the game. So many different things will change for launch, including the new game modes, maps and roles getting added. iDigitalTimes will be sure to follow along with development, trying out all the new builds from now until Boss Key is ready for release.
So what do you think? Are you interested in trying out LawBreakers for yourself? What other multiplayer games have taken up your time lately? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
