Gaming saw a rise in team-based hero shooters from 2016 through 2018, with games like Overwatch, Battleborn, and LawBreakers as notable standouts. Lawbreakers is long gone, but an unofficial fan project aims to revive it, making it playable for the first time in six years.
LawBreakers, developed by Gears of War lead designer Cliff Bleszinski's studio Boss Key Productions, was a 5v5 hero-based first-person shooter set in a futuristic anti-gravity landscape. Despite its promise, LawBreakers’ servers were shut down a year after its launch in 2018.
Somehow LawBreakers is coming back, see below!!!
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If you're interested in this weekend's public test or future tests, join the RELB discord server to learn how to get set up and keep up with the current news! https://t.co/1COV57FZQ5— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) April 13, 2024
At the time, Boss Key Productions' development team released a statement saying LawBreakers "failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds necessary to keep it sustained in the manner we had originally planned for and anticipated." In May 2018, Bleszinski announced Boss Key was “effectively no more” following the release of its battle royale game, Radical Heights.
Today, Bleszinski announced on his official X/Twitter account that LawBreakers is on the eve of a comeback thanks to an unofficial fan project called RELB. He went on to encourage players to join an upcoming public test by joining the RELB Discord server. According to a thread on ResetEra, the RELB launcher lets players boot up LawBreakers via Steam and play online multiplayer matches. Since April 13, RELB has hosted a couple of stress tests with working servers in the EU, US-EAST, and US-WEST regions with a niggling issues with matchmaking and hit registration.
"Even with all the issues seen during the stress-test our primary goal was to see if our whole backend could handle a large amount of players and it's held up beautifully," RELB admin Red wrote in the Discord's news channel. "Massive thanks to everyone in the team who helped make this happen and of course to the people who hosted servers. We're really excited about the future of this project and we hope everyone else is as well!"
In our review, we said, "LawBreakers is a fast-paced shooter with a sky high skill cap and an occasionally frustrating matchmaker."
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer at IGN.
