If you haven't heard of LawBreakers, I highly suggest you first read our comprehensive write-up on the game's history and it's creator, Cliff Bleszinski. The article is an excellent insight into Bleszinski's inspiration and the confidence he has applying his imagination to the FPS genre.

That being said, this review is going to focus on LawBreaker's gameplay and why it has caused many FPS fans to take serious notice. LawBreaker's at E3 2017 displayed such purity of vision that it was impossible to ignore. In a time where gaming is seemingly over saturated with  competitive shooters, Bleszinski does a great job of summing up why LawBreakers isn't afraid of other titles:

"The elephant in the room we always talk about is Overwatch being 'the great game'.  That is cool, but we look different. They are a character based game that so happens to be a shooter. We are, first and foremost, a shooter that then has characters and abilities"

This is the core of LawBreaker's appeal. The game is 100% built around the tenants of twitch-based shooters. The game includes Health packs, highly mobile characters, multi-tiered arenas, a complete disregard for gravity and, most importantly, a seemingly infinite skill ceiling. The better LawBreaker player won't just win vs. amateur opponents, they will completely crush them. This likely sounds too hardcore for the increasing number of casual gamers entering the FPS space but, on the other hand, it might be exactly what these players want andt just don't know it yet.

Bleszinksi has been known to describe LawBreakers as "The Dark Souls of FPS Games" and it's a fair comparison. Both games seek to gain player loyalty through the "tough-but-fair" approach to game design and both games demand precision from their players. In the same way that the signature difficulty of Dark Souls created battle-hardened players who craved mastery over its mechanics, LawBreakers aims to turn new FPS gamers who now love the genre into bleeding edge fraggers. 

Zero Gravity combat

And what separates the FPS elite from the rest of the corpses paving the kill zone? Superior movement. In LawBreakers, each class comes equipped with their own movement enhancing ability that's mastery is crucial to winning the game. A player's potential lethality is directly tied to their movement and you can bet any player caught standing still will quickly die. There is no class for players who aren't familiar or skilled at FPS games so if you don't know how to strafe or lead the target, start practicing.

The appeal is simple: it feels great to win when playing a difficult game. My first experience with LawBreakers was dizzying and saw my opponents doing cool things I had no chance at replicating. However, as I played more, I started experiencing the gradual satisfaction of no longer being a free-kill or the weakest link on my team. I had to step up my game quickly, but the appeal of doing so and seeing yourself succeed at doing something difficult is LawBreaker's biggest selling point.
 

Back to Shooting

One refreshing aspect of LawBreakers is how Bleszinski and his team have approached supporting and tanking classes. The modern resurgence of class-based shooters have introduced the gaming public to the concept of team compositions and, while it is a great way to diversify gameplay, it comes at a price. While Supporting and Tanking are crucial jobs, they aren't always the most fun. 

Tanks and Support traditionally get the least kills, are less mobile and have the most linear styles of play. Their primary job is assisting the offensive classes in shooting the enemy, which naturally results in these players doing very little shooting of their own. You won't ever find this happening in LawBreakers and Bleszinski explains why:

"I challenged the design team when it came to game types, when it came to the characters and the roles: don't do the same crap everyone else has. So we don't have the dude with the bow, we don't have the gnome that builds turrets, we don't have the pretty girl with the healing ray. Our healer is very much fire and forget. You get a heal, you get a heal, back to shooting. You know, our tank drops a shield? They don't walk with it slowly, so we can get back to shooting"

This "back to shooting" philosophy is everywhere in LawBreakers. The primary support roles so far are the aptly named Battle Medic and Harrier. These classes are every bit as lethal and mobile with, as Bleszinski described, "fire and forget" support abilities. This means that the necessity of a healing class doesn't force LawBringers to take one player out of the action.

 

Lessons Learned

LawBreakers may herald back to an age of hardcore FPS games, but its gameplay isn't exclusively a KDR obsessed deathmatch. Blitzball, Turf War, and Overcharge are the 3 current game modes that give the players something to fight over. The modes each emphasize team play and coordination, but the nature of the game easily lends itself to one hyper-skilled player to carry a match on kills alone. 

Each of the modes has clear esports viability and it is easy to imagine 10 LawBreakers pros electrifying audiences with stylish kills and inhuman feats of mobility. Each game mode operates on a clear point system, additionally lending itself to organized played and easy audience comprehension of who is winning and what the objective is.

However, the high ceiling maps and frantic pace can sometimes make the objectives feel like a distraction that gets in the way of the game's best selling point: killing enemy players. Blitzball, in particular, suffers from potentially disappointing defeats at the hand of elusive players that will avoid confronting enemies in favor of repeatedly rushing the EURO ball and attempting to score ad nauseam.

Despite the potential disconnect between team objectives and the emphasis on individual FPS mechanics, LawBreakers delivers a surprisingly polished multiplayer experience that any serious FPS player should consider. Some players will play LawBreakers on release and have a miserable time getting destroyed by veteran FPS opponents, but that in itself is a pillar of the hardcore FPS experience. 

Similar to Dark Souls, casual players that can get past the concept of dying and losing repeatedly will inevitably grow to love the grind once they start winning and maneuvering their character with purposeful precision. LawBreakers is a loud call out to every gamer who thinks they have what it takes to enter its gravity defying, skill testing environment. 

In other words, Overwatch and other FPS games like it might be training wheels, preparing a casual FPS audience for a more intense experience that LawBreakers amply provides. LawBreakers, by itself, could have never amplified the FPS genre to its current level of popularity. However, by offering a purer FPS experience than it's class-based shooter rivals, it stands to benefit most from the resurgence of FPS games.