1- GENERAL
This is not actually a proper review, just played for 5 or 6 hours, but I've asked for the opinion of some of the community on Reddit, and I have my own ideas on the game, this is what I've sum up, and there's a lot to talk about this game if you have the time and patience to listen.
Lawbreakers it's a twitch arena FPS that tries to emulate that old Quake stile games based1- GENERAL
This is not actually a proper review, just played for 5 or 6 hours, but I've asked for the opinion of some of the community on Reddit, and I have my own ideas on the game, this is what I've sum up, and there's a lot to talk about this game if you have the time and patience to listen.
Lawbreakers it's a twitch arena FPS that tries to emulate that old Quake stile games based on skills and map knowledge.
Pretty much there's no story in this game, at least one that makes any sense, so let's forget about that. For most players that's not important, but I have to mention that. Even the characters have no backstories and are kinda undifferentiated, and most times I didn't even know if I was one of the good or bad guys.
It has a good number of maps, but they are almost all very similar and not very exciting. Generically they all follow the same scheme, a flanking route and an in your face straightforward path to the objective that usually is in a central open low gravity field. There was one exception that I've loved, Vertigo map that was so open and allowed me so much more strategical options that I could spend an entire day just playing that one.
Graphics are vibrant, with a large spectrum of colors without being childish or cartoonish, but sometimes it's a bit confusing when we are engaged in a mid to long range 1v1.
I've liked the sounds from weapons, they are distinct, but sometimes I had some trouble distinguishing the hitmakers from the other sounds around.
2 – GAMEPLAY
As usual in the genre we play a 5v5 team match. The game modes are more or less the same from other games, except blitzzball where we have to do something similar so score goals, but it's essentially another capture the flag with a twist. We have 9 characters each one with different roles. They are quite distinct and they've seemed balanced. Even the community didn't mention overpowered classes when I
discuss the game in reddit, so that seems not to be an issue. It's easy to try them out and quickly you will understand witch one you like the most.
The key feature about this game is the low gravity fights, and when you get the hang of those they are quite cool and satisfying. Really thumbs up here. Also, the skill cap to master this feature is quite high. Not so high as I was expecting, but even so we are easily played around by a more experienced player, and that's how it should be. Despite that is quite easy to get into the game and take fun out of him.
When the low grav is so important in a game I found strange that most times the choke points are inside small rooms where we are permanently hitting the ceiling and objects, making the battles chaotic and sometimes disorientating. On most maps the objective is inside a room, and the playerbase is so small that any try to make a custom match just to choose the maps will end up in a empty match. It's annoying.
Now the game has a competitive mode, but maybe too little, too late. I've queued several times, two or three times for over five minutes without being able to find a match, so I was unable to play any competitive game whatsoever in this free trial.
That leaves us with quickplay. Almost zero communication and teamplay, but also almost any toxicity that I've noticed.
3 – CONCLUSION
Lawbreakers is quite a good game. Gameplay is rather good, it has good game modes, well designed characters and team roles, well balanced. Easy to get into, very mechanically rewarding, since the better players will almost always outperform worse ones.
What went wrong then?
The game does not have much content at the time, and even I noticed that it can become boring quite quickly.
Despite being good and balanced the game does not excels in nothing particularly, so people had stick around their previous games. The genre is now oversaturated and players need something outstanding to change for their main titles, just the overall quality of gameplay is not enough nowadays.
For a newcomer is not easy to find balanced matches because there's no matchmaking, just a match balance. In the other team it will surely be a good player that will dominate all newcomers, that will not have a proper learning curve. There's no kill cam so you have no chance to learn with your mistakes, and believe me when I say that half of the times you will not understand how someone killed you. It's hard for a casual, that will learn even slowly.
Now people like the loot and shiny stuff, and Lawbrakers' crates give uninteresting stuff, seems there's no shiny reward for our effort.
It seems also that at some point changes were made to the game that annoyed original players. That didn't work well. Even assuming that the changes where overall good, they have upset the current players that left, and didn't attracted new players to the game, since the player count was quite low.
Well, not enough characters left. tl;dr, just give this game some love guys!… Expand
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