Making a successful multiplayer shooter isn’t easy. Not everyone can make an Overwatch, Fortnite, Call of Duty, or Apex Legends, and upcoming hero shooters like Marvel Rivals are entering an incredibly popular market in 2024, and we can easily say the same of the shooter space over the last decade too. LawBreakers was one of the unlucky ones, as the low-gravity hero shooter never got the playerbase it needed to lift off the ground, but thanks to a fan campaign for new servers, it might just be coming back.
LawBreakers launched in 2017 as the debut project from Boss Key Productions, the studio co-founded by Gears of War veteran Cliff Bleszinski. The FPS game sadly never took off, with dwindling player numbers contributing to a server shutdown in 2018, with Boss Key itself closing down after Radical Heights – the studio’s super early access battle royale – also underperformed.
Shooters and multiplayer releases are a tough market to crack, with LawBreakers (and Boss Key Productions by extension) one of the unfortunate losses in the incredibly competitive market. Cliff Bleszinski has made it clear that he’d love to see LawBreakers return though, and it looks like he might get his wish, as an incredibly dedicated group of fans is currently running public tests for their own LawBreakers servers. This means that, yes, you can play the dead FPS after seven long years.
‘The_Mr_Shank’ was even livestreaming some LawBreakers on Twitch, if you fancy taking a trip down memory lane.
“This is a project to bring back the game LawBreakers, it’s done by creating ‘fake’ servers that the original game client uses. You can join by downloading the launcher, patching your game and playing like normal,” reads the FAQ on the project’s Discord.
Looking at the Discord, work appears to have been ongoing since 2022 with the first public playtests starting in April 2024 and deemed successful, despite the effort to revive LawBreakers being very much still “a work in progress.”
Bleszinski has even gotten wind of the project, with a tweet linking to the Discord seeing a number of people join, ready to bring the hero shooter back from the dead.
You can join the Lawbreakers revival Discord right here, with another playtest happening Sunday April 14, and more to come, if you fancy diving back into Bleszinski’s arena hero shooter.
If the return of LawBreakers has you itching for more, we’ve also got all the best multiplayer games you can play with your friends, alongside some stellar co-op games too.
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