Lawbreakers

PC, PS4

Despite a superficial resemblance to the most recent generation of multiplayer shooters, Lawbreakers is defined by how many modern trends it rejects. Gone are rigid class archetypes: instead, Boss Key has populated its debut game with characters that combine team-assisting utility with deep movement and combat mechanics, with players encouraged to be as lethal as their skill permits, regardless of their chosen role. Gone, too, are paceslowing tug-of-war modes: this is a return to the unforgiving days of team Capture The Flag and King Of The Hill, spread across a handful of well-conceived modern interpretations of those ideas. Gone is any notion of camping or slow play: this is a team shooter with no snipers, no turret-builders, no reliable stationary defences and no mass healing, where massive central low-gravity zones and dynamic movement abilities prevent traditional frontlines from forming.

These low-gravity areas are Lawbreakers’ flagship feature – gravity as principle law being broken in its almost-non-existent backstory – yet in reality this is only one innovation among many. Lawbreakers is not just notable for having one or two fresh ideas, but for the way in which it applies an experienced and critical eye to every small aspect of the action.

Lawbreakers’ nine classes feel like a best-of compilation of Quake mods and Unreal mutators. The Titan carries a rocket launcher and a lightning gun, but lacks a rapid movement ability, meaning that other characters will outpace her until you learn to blindfire rockets backwards over your own shoulders to rocketjump at speed through low-G zones. The Battle Medic stays safe through the careful management of both jetpack fuel and a powerful grenade launcher; the Wraith chains knife-dashes with knee-slides; the Assassin uses a laser-grapple to both maintain a vertical advantage and grab fleeing foes.

Although the pattern of each characters’ loadout – one or two guns, two abilities and an ultimate – will be familiar to Overwatch players, Lawbreakers differentiates itself through the sheer amount of depth. Gunslinger superficially resembles Tracer (he shares a similar teleport power) but his akimbo weapons are very different. One is a submachine gun, as per his Overwatch counterpart, but the other is a much slower-firing hand cannon. The best players seamlessly alternate between the use of both before pausing to reload.

This same attitude has been applied to game modes. ‘Push the payload’ is notable by its absence, as is any form of traditional score-attack team deathmatch. Instead, Lawbreakers divides itself between smart reinterpretations of CTF and King Of The Hill. Blitzball is the most straightforward – a ball spawns in the enemy base and must be carried to a goal before the shot clock expires – albeit complicated by the ball’s tendency to explode when the shot clock gets too low. Uplink and Overcharge, meanwhile, are mirrors of one another. In the former, teams fight over a transmitter that has to be attached to a base for a certain amount of time to score a point. In the latter, there’s a battery instead – the difference being that in Uplink the base itself gains ‘charge’, whereas in Overcharge progress towards a point is stored in the battery. These subtle variations result in very different strategic layers, with different sets of choices to be made in the closing moments of a close match. If that seems like an overly granular or niche distinction, well, that’s Lawbreakers: despite the muscular bravado of its presentation, this is a multiplayer shooter designed for people who think a lot about multiplayer shooter design. Lawbreakers’ qualities don’t reveal themselves immediately, however. It isn’t especially accessible, partly due to its high skill ceiling and partly because of how its many superficially familiar features conceal differences that are important to understand before you can get the most out of them. It requires a willingness to learn (and re-learn) on the part of the player, and the characters are so different from one another that time spent learning one does not necessarily translate to skill with another. This gives the game tremendous potential depth, and the process of sinking into Lawbreakers is a real delight if you’re of a mind to treat it with a fighting-game player’s sense of investment.

Yet Lawbreakers is not Overwatch – it’s not the shooter that will convince your non-shooter-playing friends – and that warrants concern in an era where shooter audiences have proved notably fickle. As Lawbreakers matures, Boss Key will need to create, and then sustain, a healthy player population while respecting the game’s core values. Furthermore, outside of custom games Lawbreakers currently only has a single ‘quick match’ option. Given uncertain player numbers and Lawbreakers’ high skill cap, channelling everybody into a single matchmaking queue makes sense – but matchmaking itself can be an inconsistent experience. There are, inevitably, the frustrations that come with playing team-based games with strangers. Beyond that, Lawbreakers faces issues with idle players and those that abandon matches, dooming their teams in the process. When matchmaking gets it right and games are close, this is a spectacular competitive game. When it doesn’t, or somebody abruptly pulls the plug, it isn’t.

No matter what comes next, Lawbreakers is a success. It’s proof, among other things, that veteran design talent really does mean something – and that the shooters of the late ’90s still have something to teach the modern game industry. This is more than nostalgia: it’s a paean to the genre’s potential, performed by people who know it well.

Lawbreakers’ nine classes feel like a best-of compilation of Quake mods and Unreal mutators