So this weekend there is a LawBreakers alpha going live, and in fact you can already play right this moment if you signed up and got a key.

LawBreakers is a hero driven team shooter not unlike Overwatch being developed by Boss Key, the company led by Cliff Bleszinski after he left Epic. As expected of a game from "Dude Huge" himself, it has a lot of "attitude" of what I found to be a very teenage-highschool variety. Everything seems to be edgy, and in your face, and very 90's as best exemplified by a big bloody smiley face that appears across your screen when you die. Your cast of heroes are similarly edgy in the most boring way imaginable. There is also a lot of cursing and ambient smack talk between the player characters.

My thoughts on LawBreakers? Honestly I was incredibly underwhelmed by what I played of it. As I wrote on a popular social media outlet, after only 15 minutes of LawBreakers you gain a whole new level of appreciate for how well made Overwatch is. For a game centered around "hero" characters with unique abilities, the cast in LawBreakers seems somewhat uninteresting and generic. You have a lady with swords, a guys with a rocket launcher and skull mask, a.. soldier in a jump suit? They're not silhouettes that are instantly recognizable from far away, and the colors all seem to blend together. Each "hero" has two abilities and an ultimate that work on cooldowns and these can range from passive buffs, to movement enhancing abilities or offensive powers. A lot of the secondaries seem to be various forms of grenades: for instance one hero had a proximity mine while another shot out a cluster bomb that split in mid into tiny explosive shrapnel, while another had a distortion area effect bomb. I hate to keep going back to the comparison, but a lot of this is very much like Overwatch, except grittier, so if you played Blizzards offering then you know what you're getting into here.

The shooting did not feel especially great. I tried out a few completely different classes to get a feel for different types of weapons. The best feeling of the lot was the rocket launcher which seemed to do proper damage and was well suited to the floaty nature of the gameplay. In stark cotrast a character with a huge chaingun didn't seem to be damaging my foes nearly as fast as I would expect it to. There is a kick instead of a melee and of course the ability to shoot directly behind you, which doesn't seem all the useful in combat as your character seems to take entirely too long to point the gun behind their back and start shooting. You'd think this would be a snappy movement meant to get the drop on your foes as you fly by them, but nope, it's pretty slow. Nothing in the arsenal seemed to stand out of the ordinary. Assault rifles, miniguns, rockets launchers, shotguns. It's the classic video game arsenal you've seen countless times before. The wildest of the bunch was a chain-lightning gun and a character that used a pair of swords that actually felt pretty good to use as they chopped people up real good.

This brings us to the bizarre gameplay. LawBreakers takes place in big levels that split off into side arenas where the two teams battle over control points and such. When these cap points become active a bubble forms around the arena and drops the gravity within it's confines allowing the players to fly around like you're on the surface of the moon. This is where the shooting backwards mechanic proves more useful as certain characters are able to give themselves a boost from doing so. I'm not exactly clear on the actual game modes really.. I played a few matches and we were tasked with "charging a battery" or capturing zones and I wasn't sure if the zero G bubbles are always active or only appear once the fighting starts. Either way you jump around, fly and dash while killing other "doods" respawning and coming back for more. The environments are these futuristic space facilities that wouldn't feel out of place if they showed up in Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament.

All in all it all felt very bland and slightly unresponsive in a way. Shooting enemies feels like you're just shooting sand bags and it's hard to judge if you're even doing damage. Maybe this is just me but somehow everyone seemed to always be really far away and I rarely experienced close quarters engagement. Maybe it's just not that kind of game? It's weird. I'm not sure what they were going for here. It certainly doesn't feel like an old school arena shooter. LawBreakers seems to be some really weird amalgamation of Tribes, Quake and Team Fortress. The swimmy feel of the low-g arenas robs the game of any momentum and the pace of combat suffers because of it. I wish them all the best luck in the world but after only a few matches I uninstalled the game without any desire to continue playing it.

I played about 10-15 minutes and then got bored so I quit the game and played some Overwatch instead. The shooting and movement didn't feel all that good and the game just looks so bland.

I've played two character shooters in alpha the last month, lawbreakers and paladins. I enjoyed paladins more, it's straight up fantasy overwatch. The character I played was a dragon with a rocket launcher that could hover in air.

During the E3 after hours, nothing about what Cliffy B said about this game or how he said it lead me to believe he had any faith in his own product.

After learning more about what this game is, I can't say I blame him though. Overwatch stole this game's lunch before Lawbreakers even had a chance to get in the lunch line. Is this game gonna be another Battleborn, in terms of people stop playing it in record time and go back to Overwatch?

For the lazy here is a link to sign up for the alpha. http://lawbreakers.nexon.net/en# I'm pretty excited to try it out. Looks pretty cool.

First paragraph perfectly sums up my thoughts from the outside without having played it. That's not surprising though as pretty much anything Cliff touches falls flat for me.

The alpha has actually been going for a little more than a month now and it is...underwhelming, like you said. Although they made A LOT of progress in those weeks and actually incorporated player feedback from one week to the next rather quickly. Right now it is kind of a bummer, yes, I don't like it. But the way they've been dealing with feedback and are actually improving things, I could see this turning out well by the end of it. The foundation is solid.

@humanity: Nice write up. My interest in LawBreakers can be measured by three things.

Moderate - Oh wow, there's a grappling hook in LawBreakers!

Low - Oh, now LawBreakers is only coming out on PC, and there won't be any console versions.

None - Oh wow, there's a grappling hook in Titanfall 2!

@iron1c: Oh really that long? Thats weird! It felt rough enough to have me fooled. For instance I rebound the keys for the abilities to be under Q, E and F like I have it set in Overwatch, but they never changed on the game HUD which kept confusing me. When I went to the menu to set it back to default the button didn't work. Small stuff like that which I would think would get ironed out within a months time. Either way that doesn't really change the core gameplay which just didn't feel very satisfying to me.

@spaceinsomniac Heck yah team grappling hook all the way. Tribes Vengeance had an amazing grappling hook. I never played Titanfall but everything about Titanfall 2 looks really awesome, including the aforementioned grappling hook. Thats part of the problem with LawBreakers really. While Titanfall 2 is doing some cool new things in the first person shooter genre, I feel like LawBreakers isn't really going out of it's way to innovate. The zero-g stuff almost feels like a fan made mod thats half broken and doesn't really fit in all that well. What is more perplexing is that they really don't do much with it either. There is zero-g, some characters have a boost or something, but some don't and you simply get an awkward floaty jump. You can't push off walls, grapple, or do anything exciting in the zero-g sphere. You simply move slower, which seems like the last thing you want from a frantic arena shooter.

I'm also perplexed by this weird push back online about people comparing this game to Overwatch like they're completely different games. I guess the big difference is that Overwatch is a pretty fun game while LawBreakers is an extremely self serious and lackluster affair. That said, they are both team based, hero driven, objective mode online shooters where each character has two abilities and an ultimate. The details might be different, because of course they have to be, but that skeleton they both based on is identical. LawBreakers does a worse job at actually being a team based game but thats just poor game design.

@humanity: Oh, uhh, if you think that is rough/early...graphic settings got introduced last week.

Edit: Speaking about graphic settings: The game doesn't look super great but currently requires an above-average PC to hit 60FPS consistently. So much for their "consoles are too weak!" talk. I guess they can't optimise for shit.

@iron1c: Oh proper optimization has always been a thing. Look at Uncharted 4 - game looks stunning and runs great on PS4. Not because when you put in the disc it unlocks some secret graphical computing cores, but because they took the time to properly optimize it for that hardware, eeking out every last bit of strength and it totally paid off. I just recently got SOMA on sale for PS4 and the load times on that game are ridiculous considering how it looks, not to mention how it freezes for several seconds each time you hit a checkpoint.

Well isnt it an alpha from a smaller independent studio? Its probably going to be real hard to compete with a billion dollar blizzard game. Since it is alpha hopefully they can fix the issues and could afford to push the game back if they need too as the base game looks real promising to me.

@oursin_360: It's from a smaller studio, yes, but when that smaller studio is headed up by the guy that made Gears of War 1-3, among lots of other games, it's gonna get compared to similar games from any sized studio.

Just got into the alpha and played around with it for about 30 minutes.

Even without comparing it to recent hits and flops in the genre, like Overwatch and Battleborn, this has to be the most bland and uninspired shooter I've played in years. From the cookiecutter character designs to the cringe-inducing one-liners and the boring, sterile UI, it all reeks of shovelware-quality F2P.

Only positive I could find was that it runs rather smooth, but there's not much point in reaching 165 FPS on a 165 Hz monitor when it appears that every animation in the game is rendered at around 30 FPS.

You're right I guess but not really how it should be and I haven't' viewed it that way. My expectations on this were in line with indie FPS games. This being not so great was not really a surprise for me. There are some interesting ideas, but I think the art style of the game is a lost cause. I am sure it will improve but I don't know how much. I haven't even played Overwatch and it doesn't do all that much for me from what I saw. This kind of shooter isn't something that gets me going anymore.

I will play BF 1 and I want to see how Titanfall 2 turns out but I'm not going to be playing any more multiplayer FPS beyond that.

I really have to guess, that with Cliffy B's out of no where "Woooo out of retirement back into games" tweets in 2014 for this game before it was called Lawbreakers, their partnership with Nexon of all people (gross), and just the early impressions of how plain/bland/meh this is, Cliffy B probably needed to find a source of income.

I don't want to think that this kinda bland idea of a game was a revelation that drove Cliff out of "game dev retirement".

I also wonder if, with Nexon as their publisher/partner, this game isn't really aimed at the western world, and will eventually get localized in the Asian countries Nexon holds a firm grasp over.

@takayamasama: It would in fact be pretty disappointing if this is the best that Cliffy B can come up with. The man has quite a reputation for being if nothing else a creative designer and this game looks anything but. Like I said earlier, it reeks of this 90's dime-a-dozen shooter.

I played during the first alpha weekend, and the first feedback I posted on the forums wasn't gameplay related at all.

It was "Every single character is shitty."

To their credit, a dev responded saying "Yeah, we are working on toning it down a bit", and the next weekend I didn't have to turn down the audio, but there's some REALLY bad dialogue in this. It's not bad enough to be funny or self-aware, either. It's just bad.

The thing I still feel pretty strongly about is that with the mode where you grab the objective and take it back to your base to defend it for a while to score, it should be more of a constant push. By going back to your own base, you are going towards your defenses, your allies who are respawning. If you had to keep going towards the enemy, and guard it in their base, that'd be much more intense. It seems like the kind of thing that you would want out of a game going for adrenaline-rush combat.

As it is, I'm waddling around to the next fight more than I am fighting.

I seem to be the only one here who had a decent first impression I guess? I like Overwatch, played a fair bit but haven't gone crazy over it. LawBreakers feels a little faster and I like the high flying gravity stuff. Not sure if I'll stick with it or even buy it at launch but right now, its fun to me.

Biggest complaint is some matches can seriously drag on way too long if both teams are good at juggling the battery.

I believe that's known as the Parthian shot.

People comparing this to Overwatch is kind of like the comparison between Batman vs Superman and The Avengers.

@mrpandaman: Trying to do the same thing where one is massively successful and the other is a hot pile of garbage?