PAX East 2016 – Dead By Daylight, LawBreakers, and Shadow Warrior 2

Dead By Daylight

Ever wanted to be the villain of an 80s slasher flick, but aren’t quite sure how to skin people? Dead By Daylight has you covered. It’s a 4v1 multiplayer experience where players try to turn on power 5 power generators on a map while avoiding a serial killer. They don’t have any weapons, but have the classic tools of all slasher victims — pushing things in the way of the killer and hiding. The killer’s objective is to hang all four of the other players on meathooks and let them slowly die. The players can wiggle out of the meathook and crawl about, so the killer has to be on his toes trying to catch, keep track of players. The game is still early in development, so there’s limited maps and mechanics, but the core concept is really intense and competitive.

Dead By Daylight will be out June 14, 2016 on Steam, but you can preorder it now.

LawBreakers

LawBreakers is a new team role-based FPS multiplayer game from Nexon. In the demo we played, players had to capture a battery, charge it in their base, then deposit it there. It’s an interesting twist on capture the flag since the other team can choose to let you charge the battery up, but before you capture it, steal it from you with a well timed rush.

The game currently only has 4 classes, but the classes aren’t the main focus. It’s more about the gravity-defying elements in which different parts of the map have different effects, allowing you to perform different moves at different times. It’s very similar to Overwatch, if more focused due to its smaller character roster. That being said, it lacks a lot of the charm that Overwatch has strictly because of its lack of relatable or interesting characters. The game is still very fun, especially when you have a good team going, but the mark of a good competitive multiplayer game is if you’re having fun when your team is awful, and I’m not quite sure this delivers on that. It’s still in development and I’m sure they’ll have more to offer on full release, but for now, it seems it has to bake a little longer.

LawBreakers is out this Summer on PC.

Shadow Warrior 2

If Borderlands is your kind of game and you don’t care much about multiplayer, you should be paying attention to Shadow Warrior 2. In the game you take control of a modern day ninja fighting a bevy of monsters across randomly generated maps for missions.

Not unlike Borderlands, Shadow Warrior 2 is about loot and plenty of it. In each map, you’ll find randomly generated weapons of varying quality. The weapons themselves are nice, but what sets this game apart is the customization of each weapon. You can add status effects and elemental properties to every weapon. You can also switch them out on the fly, meaning you’re not married to one element on a weapon at all. You can also dual wield almost any weapon, which just further increases the crazy amount of customizability.

From the demo, it looks like there’s a serviceable story, but the real focus here is the loot. If you’re a fan of loot grind games and feeling really awesome, Shadow Warrior 2 should be on your radar.

Shadow Warrior 2 is out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC later this year.