Thus, you never know what you may end up with or what you'll be up against in each match.įrom our brief experience with Spellbreak's beta build, it seems to be incorporating parts of other battle royale games in smart ways while providing an identity of its own. The catch is that runes are pickups you have to find while looting rather than predetermined character abilities that are dependent on who you choose. In practice they are very similar to Wraith's Into the Void run or Bloodhound's Eye of the Allfather scan from Apex Legends, respectively. Runes that proved most useful during my demo include the dashing technique that grants temporary invisibility and a howl that detects (and tracks) enemies through walls for a short period. Spellbreak's runes are non-offensive capabilities that can be extremely helpful for survival and work similarly to tactical abilities or ultimates in Apex Legends. There is one other important piece to the game's gameplay dynamic, one it has in common with a fellow battle royale.
While mana regenerates extremely fast, managing the resource in fast-paced battles is the key to playing smart, and a sensible substitute for scavenging and juggling ammo types. Both basic magic attacks and jumping great heights cost mana, and this prevents you from simply spamming attacks and hopping or floating around everywhere. You have to be measured in combat, though. Combat feels a lot less predictable and more varied than traditional firefights you get from other battle royale games. The elements of Spellbreak's combat are all reactive, no matter who's casting, and further possibilities open up when you begin coordinating spells with teammates. And with a poison gauntlet, you can turn that ice trail into a harmful strip of terrain that deals damage-over-time. There are other secondary effects to consider the sniper-like frost gauntlet shoots deadly arrows, but when launched from the air, it leaves a trail of ice that players can skate across to traverse even faster. On the flipside, wind attacks can dissipate walls of fire to create a safe opening in your own or get past one from an enemy. A devastating combo would be to cast a tornado and light it up with a fireball to turn it into a damage-dealing firestorm. Now take those two elemental gauntlets I described, and think about how they can interact with each other. For example, the fire gauntlet allows you to shoot chunky fireballs, and its special attack casts a wide wall of fire in front of you-or the wind gauntlet, which shoots fast, low-damage gusts and has a special that summons a tornado that can trap enemies. Every element of gauntlet offers its own unique basic attack and special cooldown ability. When you drop into a match, though, gauntlets of any element can be found as loot in the field, of which you can equip two simultaneously (one on each arm).
You start with a choice between six classes, each of which determine a roster of perks for a certain element-type and a starting magic gauntlet (the game's weapons). Now Playing: Spellbreak Beta Gameplay - A Magical Battle Royale Win Gameplay (See our gameplay video above where we won a match that came down to the wire.)īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's But Spellbreak forgoes guns in favor of magic, and it's this premise that allows the game to be different. Many elements of Spellbreak may be familiar to you if you've spent time with any of the battle royale games out there: you jump into large-scale deathmatches on a big map where everyone has one life and scavenges for good gear, and a ring gradually closes in on a random location, forcing fights between remaining players. However, there seems to be room for games to offer fresh takes on the last-person-standing subgenre, and judging from our time playing the latest build of Spellbreak, developer Proletariat's magically infused battle royal seems to do just that. Fortnite remains leaps and bounds ahead of all others in terms of popularity (which just launched a slew of new features in its Chapter 2, Season 1), and Apex Legends stands on solid ground as the premier FPS in this space. At a time when we seem to be flooded with battle royale games, it's been increasingly hard for new ones to find their place.