There’s also buildings spread across the map, mostly medieval castles and walls. Green pastures, high mountains, lakes, forests – mainly natural formations. On a first glance, the look of Spellbreak’s battle royale arena isn’t too different from what we’re used to seeing in other games of the genre, including Fortnite. The landing phase is accompanied by gloriously epic symphonic music that seems to arrive straight out of The Matrix movies, before leaving us to the silence of the barren fields, interrupted only by the noises of war. This means all players touch the ground pretty much at the same time, and that’s when the action begins. The drops are essentially vertical, not much room to manouver and no parachutes to use. Think the final battle in Endgame, but the portals are horizontal and in the sky. After that, expect no airplanes to drop from in the game’s medieval fantasy world, and the game doesn’t currently dive into high fantasy like dragons or other flying creatures, so the match effectively begins with the players effectively choosing one from a series of randomly placed portals on the map, from which they can drop onto the island that holds the battle royale match. If the tutorials weren’t enough, similarly to many other titles of the genre, there’s some pre-game lobby action, where during the wait for the real deal, players can freely explore, fight each other without losing health, and pick up any and all equipment available in the game, distributed together neatly in various locations to allow free testing of what’s to come. So, shall we enter the arena of Spellbreak? The game only launched with 3-player squads, but duos and solos are also being phased out around the time this preview goes live. ![]() ![]() The menu hints at the eventual arrival of story chapters, but for now there’s only a handy tutorial and… the battle royale mode. For the moment, Spellbreak (which I continually want to call Spellbound for some reason) is just a core gameplay loop, with much of the window dressing still about to come. So they use said magic to… uhm… murder the hell out of each other on an island? Forget opening movies, cutscenes or dialogues, not even the playable characters make remarks like it happens in Apex Legends. ![]() All you really need to know is that you’re among the Vowkeepers, a group of rebels fighting against a system that disallows them from using any magic. ![]() You’d be forgiven for thinking that Spellbreak doesn’t have a story or lore, because as far as in-game content goes, there is essentially none. Will it be enough for the game to cut itself out a share of the market, or will it fade into obscurity? Spellbreak’s free-to-play and humble Game Preview beginnings have been at players’ disposal for a couple days now, here’s what we’ve thought about it so far. Boston-based developer Proletariat is aware that they need to do something bold and different to stick the landing, and that’s exactly the plan: it’s still a battle royale, sure, but one on a smaller scale, and most importantly by using elemental magic that can be combined to create a unique and varied combat model. Yet, here we are again, talking about yet another title trying to grab out of a market that, at this point, is ridiculously crowded, and where anything below greatness is destined to fade away rapidly. Just the other week, we reviewed Hyper Scape, Ubisoft’s attempt to take the world of battle royale by storm.
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