I've been exploring a "Dead" game off Steam over the last couple days. It's the uninspiringly-named Lawbreakers, by a now-defunct company founded by Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee, two names I think a lot of you will recognize. It's an online-only arena shooter with no private server support at all, and its servers are scheduled to shut down on the 14th (i.e. four days from now.) You can download it for free right now, but this is the end.
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The actual gameplay isn't anything original but there's a ton of cool content in here. The maps are small but gorgeous & the art style and direction works pretty well throughout. There's some great music in here too. It reminds me a lot of later Unreal Tournament games like UT2004. It even runs "ok" in 720p/high detail on my low-spec games PC (C2Q + GTX750Ti) despite me only having 3 out of the recommended 6 gigs of RAM. I could have some fun with this.
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I've been trying to figure out if there's even gonna be a way to wander around the empty maps once the servers go down. Doesn't look like it, unfortunately.
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There's an indicator on the menu screen of how many other players are online. In the ~2.5 hours I was playing around hosting my own games last night, that number never budged from zero. Wow.
Incidentally the story of the studio that put this out, Boss Key Productions, reminds me a lot of one I posted about earlier, Rocket Science Games. Started by some huge-name industry veterans with a ton of money, fanfare, and talent, but for whatever reason they got the hype formula wrong & folded not long after their first game.
It looks like they put a ton of effort into this and really wanted to make something awesome, but it never 'took' and now it's gonna die. If they'd added even the most basic botmatch features it'd be a great game to pop into for a quick blast-em-up, or even get some LAN matches going. But no, this one is locked to servers that are going down forever and this game tanked so badly it apparently took the company down with it. Would be nice if future devs learn something from that.
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