LawBreakers — a hero shooter

After taking a break, the creator of Gears of War — Cliff Bleszinski is finally releasing a new game. Developed by Boss Key Productions, LawBreakers is a hero shooter where players compete to fulfil the objective before the enemy team.

The game is balanced around five players a side and you can choose from the usual selection of classes. Depending upon which character you choose, you will get an assault rifle, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a pair of pistols and so on; with their own set of abilities that are tailored to the purpose of that class. But at its core, LawBreakers is definitely focused more on shooting than Overwatch. As such, you can easily take on enemies on your own and succeed if your shooting and movement skills are up to the task, which is a nice change of pace for those who want to play a hero shooter that is also viable as a regular FPS.

The game’s unique selling point is the frantic pace and its use of gravity. Not only do almost all characters have abilities that help with movement, the maps themselves consist of several zero-g areas. You can combine these to move from one side to the other at exhilarating speeds, in addition to flying high above enemies for tactical advantage.

LawBreakers comes with four game modes that are a variation on objective style gameplay. In Overcharge you must capture a battery, defend it until it gets fully charged and then wait another 20 seconds to score points. But the battery retains its charge so a team can steal it at the last second. In Uplink the battery is replaced by a satellite dish but the upload percentage is tied to your team and not the dish itself.

Turf War requires you to capture zones while in Blitzball you must score touchdowns in order to score. It’s a nice collection of modes on launch, which will hopefully get more varied and utilise its unique mechanics better in the future.

There isn’t really much to LawBreakers other than the shooting feels good and it plays at a thrilling pace. Its an otherwise standard hero shooter that will not make you switch from your preferred game in any way. I will say that if presentation is important to you, LawBreakers has a pretty bland cast with no real personality. In addition, the image quality and performance on PS4 aren’t great. As such the game is priced accordingly. LawBreakers is currently listed at Rs 1,900 on Steam and Rs 2,247 on PSN.