I was checking out the Steam Store yesterday when they showed me this game called Spellbreak on the frontpage. It's a free battle royale game where we battle it out with magic instead of the typical guns. It had just received a new update and it was harvesting some nice and positive reviews as of lately. I decided to give it a go and I wasn't disappointed! I even won my first match with a decent 11 kills.
The Power of the Gauntlets!
The game starts you out with a tutorial which is pretty nice. These games often just throw you into the fray and have you learn as you go. This can lead to some frustrating first games where you're learning the ropes. Instead you've given a tutorial which teaches you everything you need to know.
What you need to know is how your spells work, what kind of loot there is and how to find it. It's pretty straightforward which I liked. No need to make a game like this more complicated that it has to be.
Whenever you start a game you choose one out of six classes. You can choose to wield the powers of fire, lightning, wind, earth, toxicity and frost. Each of these gives you a different base attack and a cooldown spell. The tutorial starts you off with the Pyromancer (fire) which is also the first class you have unlocked. The rest are unlocked by playing a few games.
As in most battle royale games you find a ton of loot around the map. The first thing you'll want to look out for is another magic glove. This let's you get a second power to use. What's cool here is that the different classes can be combined to create some damn powerful combos.
For instance if you're a Pyromancer and you find a toxic gauntlet you also get the powers from the Toxicologist. This let's you shoot both fire and poison. You can then let out a poison cloud with the toxic gauntlets and shoot it with a fireball from the fire gauntlet to make it explode and deal extra damage. That's awesome! It seems like all classes has some sort of combo between them.
In one of the games in my video (which I won) I had the fire gauntlet and the air gauntlet. This let me conjure a tornado which lit on fire if I threw a fireball into it. Fire tornado!? Hell yeah!
Gear Up!
There's also other gear that's important to get. You can equip yourself with amulets, belts and boots that you find around the map. These increases stats like your shield, run speed and maximum mana. They range in rarity from common through legendary and with increased rarity come increased stats.
There's also runes which give you some sort of utility ability. These can let you see where your enemies are through walls close to you, make you invisible for a few seconds or give you a really high jump. There's more than the ones I mentioned and all of them are pretty cool.
I was using an invisibility rune in both the games I've won so far. It's really powerful. Just go invisible, get close to an enemy and then nuke them down. I need to test out some more runes when I get into some more games.
It Looks Great!
I have to say that this game looks great. It has cartoony graphics which I don't mind at all. Coupled with what seems like a great lighting engine the game really looks pretty and colorful. Most importantly it runs great to. With my system I'm getting a solid 60+ FPS in even the most heated of moments with the graphics set to Ultra.
Winner Winner!
When I loaded the game up I decided to run through the tutorial and play a full game before recording for my first impressions video. Of course I had the game of my life and won that first match with a dazzling 11 kills. Then, when I started recording I lost my very first encounter in that game. Quite unlucky.
Nonetheless I did manage to get a win on camera! Only four kills in that match but it was still a good one. I ran the Pyromancer class coupled with an air gauntlet. I had full epic gear by the end and managed to do some cool plays thanks to the invisibility rune.
As far as I've managed to gather it seems like this game uses skill based matchmaking (SBMM). This means players of the same skill level gets matched against eachother. That could explain why I had such an easy time in my first game only for the opponents to get better in the next one.
Any Hivers Playing?
If anyone on Hive is playing this and wants to go for a few games then hit me up! The game can be played in solo, duo and squad mode. Squads are teams of three as far as I know. Would be really awesome to get a squad going and wreck some face. Just watch out cause this game has friendly fire!
As for right now the game doesn't have the biggest player base. It seems to have around 1500 people on at normal times and when I played at peak hours yesterday there were about 2500 people online. Not a huge player base which probably explains the 1-2 minute wait time to find a match.
Now the game has a battle pass and all that jazz that I don't really care about. I won't be paying them money to have to go on a grind. In that case I'd rather just pay them for a skin or two.
All unsourced images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
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