Gamers who had a chance to put hands on Boss Key Production’s launch title, Lawbreakers, only have good things to say about it. Its frantic pace, gravity-defying action, and explosive combat all leave a distinct mark and now it is almost ready for everyone else to get a chance. At the PC Gaming conference at E3 2017, the company revealed the game would hit both Steam and PlayStation Network for pre-order on Tuesday. It will officially launch on August 8.
To ensure the game is up to snuff, the team will host another beta before the commercial launch, which users can sign up for here. PlayStation users will be able to dig into the closed beta starting June 28, and Steam’s beta will begin on June 30. Regardless of platform, the beta will end on the morning of July 3, so that Boss Key has plenty of time to make changes and smooth out any issues.
Which, apparently, has already happened. Early beta testers said the game could be faster and brought to light some balance issues with the shotgun — not a surprise for anyone who has played an FPS recently. This round will reflect the updated pace of the game, as well as some more mechanical issues that have been solved. Boss Key lead Cliff Bleszinski, a former Epic Games developer who worked on games like Unreal Tournament and the Gears of War franchise, has a lot riding on Lawbreakers, and it draws heavily on the speedy arena shooters of yore that he worked on.
In an ever-evolving world of first-person shooters and class-based action games, Lawbreakers will have to work hard to set itself apart from the competition. If the lightning-fast, ever-moving gameplay videos are any indication, this title will be in a genre all its own. When it launches on August 8, it will only cost $30, without locking players out of any features or requiring them to build up credits or gear found in free-to-play games.
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.