When you have a renowned developer like Cliff Bleszinski as the co-founder of a fledgling game company, expectations are going to be high. You still need to stand out from the crowd though, and LawBreakers looks to do just that by crunching up the laws of gravity and tossing them out the window.
As the dust settled after a cataclysmic event that shattered the Moon and brought Newtonian physics into question, humanity rebuilt in this drastically altered world, and started to discover how to bend gravity to its will in the process. Of course, there were plenty of political machinations in the wake of this disaster – not least the US government selling the Grand Canyon to the Yakuza by way of a shell corporation – and it’s led to a time of turbulence, as the Law faces off against the Breakers. Yeah, it’s a kind of cheesy premise to get to that name.
The story’s not the important thing though, as LawBreakers is a purely multiplayer game that captures a lot of the current trends in first person shooters and remoulds them into something new. For example, sides have four unique characters, but they share abilities in a symmetrical set up that avoids the trap of having a bafflingly large gallery of people to choose from – Cliff Bleszinski jokingly refers to the game as an “anti-hero shooter”. There’s also bubbles of low gravity and gravity manipulation that can keep your feet off the ground, there’s special abilities, inventive new game modes… it’s almost difficult to know where to begin.
Of course, you do have to start with the gravity that is at the heart of this game’s particular style of play. A central area of the Grandview map that we played on was dominated by a bubble of low gravity. As soon as you enter it, you’re able to take giant leaps into the air and float to the central column. In a genre of gaming where predictability is a death sentence, those arcing jumps and the extended time spent in the air can easily be your demise, but at the same time, this can play into your hands.
Boss Key have got much of the feel right for the lower gravity areas. The character animations blend nicely to look like they’re floating and that the character’s legs trail behind their movements, there’s a lot of debris that can just hang in the air, and there’s the simple satisfaction of how the physics work to handle the disparate levels of gravity. Kill an enemy and send their corpse flying to the edge of the low gravity area, and as soon as normality is restored, their body quickly drops back to ground. Similarly, firing your weapons will gently push you backwards.
Though there are four distinctive characters on each side to choose from, their archetypes are shared and they’re designed as opposing pairs, so that both sides have the same weapons and abilities available to them. They’re quite well suited to this changeable environment, whether it’s with the jet packs of the opposing Vanguard characters that allow them to fly and maintain greater control in low gravity or the Assassin’s dash move and grappling hooks that allow them both to soar through the sky, swinging from the tops of the buildings to try and strike from above in a flurry of blades.
The Enforcer is a fairly conventional soldier type, with an assault rifle and shoulder mounted homing rockets, while the Titan is even heavier and almost achingly slow in comparison to the others. The opposing Titans, Chronos and Bomchelle, make up for it with a leaping smash attack and a super that lets them send lightning from their fingertips. They’re excellent as a battering ram to make or break a defence.
While more characters are on the way, having just these first four archetypes made getting to grips with the game quite manageable. I spent time at the event getting used to the grappling hooks of the Assassins, and while nowhere as accomplished as some of the devs, I was swinging around the edge of the map in no time. Trying to learn the nuances of the Titan’s rocket launcher, to early detonate and send an incoming enemy flying off the map, or any of the character’s super abilities, like the Vanguard’s Starfall, which creates a low grav bubble and kicks everyone caught inside it up into the air.
The mixture of varying gravity and characters are already enough to create those water cooler moments – do people talk near water coolers anymore? – but they can be amplified by what is a rather fascinating new game mode called Overcharge.
The start of the match sees the teams fight over a battery in the heart of the map’s low gravity well, trying to get it back to their base and defend it until it can charge up to 100% to score. It sounds simple, but the initial flurry of combat in the middle quickly turns to a form of attack and defence. You can’t just run in and out of the enemy base either, as the battery gets a shield whenever its dropped that needs to be drained before it can be picked up again. In other words, you need to work as a team to control the area before making a daring escape.
Another clever twist is that the battery doesn’t lose any charge when it’s stolen. It could almost be advantageous to swoop in when it’s nearly done and only have to defend for the last few moments. Even once the battery hits 100%, there’s an American sports inspired 20 second period in which you still need to guard it in order to score, allowing for the last ditch attempt to spirit it away. It’s agonising when it’s stolen right at the last, and even though it felt as though the odds were stacked a little too heavily in favour of the defence, the potential for last second drama runs all the way through.
Boss Key talk about having “Modes that Matter”, and that certainly feels like it’s true of Overcharge. You won’t see Team Deathmatch or plain old Capture The Flag here, though I feel these would still work well off the back of the game’s variable physics, but they’ll build a handful of similarly inventive and innovative twists on ideas we’ve seen elsewhere.
Though Boss Key are purely focussed on making LawBreakers for PC, they’re not ruling out the possibility of releasing the game on console, just saying that someone else would be handed development duties. Watching trailers and videos, it looks too fast and twitchy for anything but a keyboard and mouse, but sitting down to actually play and with the characters in my control, it feels like it would still work well on a gamepad.
Either way, there’s a lot of nuances to learn within the game. Though I grasped the basics of each character, watching developers play the game highlighted some of the extremes that they can be taken to. I was particularly taken with the grace and speed with which the Assassin characters could swing around the map, searching for prey to drop down upon from above.
In a lot of ways, LawBreakers is an encapsulation of the direction that first person shooters have taken over the last few years. There’s distinctive characters, a certain vibrancy to the art style, a faster pace than we had for much of the last decade. Put like that, it doesn’t sound like anything special, but alongside a polished look and feel, the unifying notion of gravity manipulation and some clever twists to its game modes help it to stand out.
We travelled to North Carolina and visited the Boss Key Productions studios for the purposes of this preview and surrounding content. Travel and accommodation for this event was provided by Nexon.