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If Bosskey's daring, uneven debut has taught me anything, it's that every blast cloud has its silver lining. We're a few minutes into a round of Capture The Flag variant Overcharge on the Grandview map - a mixture of Black Ops 3's Combine and Shanghai from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, furnished with jade statues of rampaging samurai, a golden temple bell on a central rock spur and sprays of cherry blossom that make surprisingly effective aerial cover. The idea in Overcharge is to claim a battery from the map's heart, ferry it to your base and defend the thing while it powers up - the twist being that the other side can yank victory from the ashes by stealing your prize when it's a few percentage points from full. It's a capacity for reversals derived, like much else in LawBreakers, from sport. "That's one of the things I've tasked my design team with," declares Bosskey's co-founder Cliff Bleszinski, who seems to have lost none of his old energy for spending two years outside the industry following his departure from Epic in 2012. "Give me modes that end with drama, because I've learned to love sports in my adult life, be it soccer, American football, NCAA basketball, and those last second buzzer beaters are what makes the crowd go wild."
I'm following our battery carrier out of the other team's base when everything goes a bit Dawn of Justice: a hovering Vanguard player unleashes her Starfall slam attack, splatting the poor man like a meringue. Seeking the vengeance only a barrage of unguided munitions can provide, I switch to my Titan's rocket launcher, sally forth and am suddenly, miraculously airborne. A side effect of Starfall, you see, is that it creates a brief, shimmering pocket of low gravity around the point of impact.
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