E3 2016 Day 1 Recap – Civilization VI, Xenoverse 2, Lawbreakers, and More!

Lawbreakers

What is up world!? BakermanBrad here and I got to join JamesBl0nde in playing some matches of Lawbreakers, which he’s shown off a little bit of news in the latest new video. Getting to sit down and play their new twist on a domination style match and getting my hands dirty trying to break the law was definitely a fun experience.

So to get the obvious out of the way, I will say that yeah, Lawbreakers is another shooter, MOBA, combo with a twist, and anybody will be able to hop right in and get going with the basics. Shortly after that however, you notice very quickly just how entertaining zero-G really can be. Whether it’s sling shot-ing around a corner from grappling with the assassin, or blind firing a rocket back over your shoulder to launch yourself rapidly across the map as a titan, you begin to see just how much space you have to utilize that shooters these days don’t usually have. To add to the twist, Lawbreakers has taken your standard domination match, and tweaked that as well, giving each match a round based feel, without losing the moment of gameplay.

Now to elaborate, these matches have your common 3 capture points that you have to control to get points. But instead of controlling those points for the duration and just playing a camping game, after a point has been captured, that’s it, point awarded MOVE ON, because after all 3 points are captured in that “in-game round” you enter an intermission that resets those points but does not break up the gameplay. This gives an interesting concept of continuing the fight and allowing for a more entertaining round in something that normally can end up becoming a little stale. Also, during this intermission, kills will award the player who made a kill, and only that player, a capture buff for the next immediate round. This plus the capture points being a one and done still point setup really created a fast pace feel that was very enjoyable.

What really made Lawbreakers entertaining for me in particular was the Vanguard class! Now to back track a moment the 4 classes available for the Law or the Breakers are actually identical, and this made me happy. In particular set ups, I always felt that if two factions that had random matchmaking had different classes, it created an imbalance for the over all player base, especially for those who were just getting into the game. On top of that, a game like Lawbreakers that is working on creating a more skill based game, really relies on a fair playing field for longevity and entertainment. While speaking of fairness, I did notice that the balance of the classes had clear cut health and mobility differences that were dramatically affected by the Zero-G physics, creating a slight learning curve, or at least more so than the typical time it takes to get familiar with each individual class. Now to give an example, I’ll get back to the Vanguard. Instead of a sprint, the Vanguard has a booster pack that allows the vanguard to literally fly around the map even in zero-g, and the trade off for mobility is being significantly easier to kill.

Clearly this just scratched the surface on the classes, but the very clear differences make it easy for many different play styles to get into Lawbreakers. When it comes to the classes, they will all be available to players from the get go because Lawbreakers has recently announced that the game will no longer be free to play. This decision was made to assist in creating the fair playing field for the skill based matches, but one interesting reason was actually to help alleviate an issue in testing with hacking.

To sum things up, the overall feel of Lawbreakers was crisp, clean, and very entertaining. I am excited to see whats going on in Lawbreakers, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else the do to tweak the shooter/MOBA genre that’s becoming commonplace. Hopefully they will continue to bring some healthy spice to the genre, and bring us something awesome. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and make sure to let everyone know what’s to come, as well as bringing all the best E3 coverage. But when it comes to Lawbreakers at E3, you don’t break the law…the law breaks you.

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