I don’t like fantasy. Game of Thrones? Lord of the Rings? World of Warcraft? Nope, not for me. I also don’t like battle royale games. Whether it’s the realism of PUBG or the wackiness of Fortnite, I find games where you compete to be the last one standing more boring than tense. So how did Spellbreak, a game whose whole hook is being a fantasy battle royale, become one of my favorite PC game surprises of the year? Ironically, by using the creative potential of the fantasy genre, it breathes new life into the tired battle royale formula.
You’re a Wizard
Initially, Spellbreak should seem instantly familiar to anyone who has played a battle royale. You land on a massive continent. You scavenge for gear and destroy anyone in your path while a storm closes in. Eventually, the victor emerges. You’ve seen this in everything from Apex Legends to Call of Duty: Warzone to Realm Royale, which also added a fantasy style. However, from the basic framework, the game quickly diverges from battle royale conventions.
As a radical “Battlemage” wizard, you have no need for mortal firearms. Instead of guns, your weapons are different elemental gauntlets. You pick one of these gauntlets before starting a match to shape your general playstyle as you’ll have their distinct abilities for the entire round. Do you want to shoot powerful fireballs, long-range ice missiles, or waves of toxic goo that poison opponents over time? You also find more gauntlets on the battlefield to equip on your other hand, giving you access to two elements at once. Spellbreak is more of a third-person, competitive multiplayer, action-RPG than a standard shooter. It reminds me of Smite’s close-up, action-packed take on MOBAs.
Other gear includes health potions, belts that allow you to equip shields, faster boots, and gauntlet upgrades. The game does a great job telling you if the gear you find is useful or not. Drop a waypoint near a glowing orb so your team can protect you as you open a legendary chest. You’ll also find and swap runes that grant access to another special ability—usually a new movement option like dashing, teleporting, or rising up into the air. Even by default, characters have huge jumps and can hover over gaps while firing, leading to many high-flying encounters straight out of Crackdown 3 or a superhero movie. During one match, a teammate created a continuous slick ice path for us to run faster and escape the storm, a very cool, Iceman-esque move.
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The big, flashy magical spells turn fights into explosive spectacles—more frantic and more exciting than hiding in a bathtub with a shotgun. With only 42 players at once instead of 100, matches breeze by whether you play solo, duo (not rolled out yet by the developers at time of testing), or in a squad of three. If you die when playing with teammates, you become a ball of light. You can slowly move around for a limited amount of time searching for a teammate to revive you. However, if a foe catches you first, they can then exile you for good. Large projectiles combined with generous health and shields make combat feel more approachable for casual players than PUBG—or even Fortnite, with its unwieldy building system. It feels like something Blizzard might have made.
Spellbreak is an accessible game. Maybe it’s due to bots, but I’ve seen nearly everyone win their first match. However, there’s more to the mechanics once you start digging. Elemental attacks behave differently when mixed together. Fire and poison are strong on their own, but you can then set your poison puddle on fire to make your offensive even more overwhelming. This opens up nifty strategic options when deciding primary and secondary loadouts. Each gauntlet also has a special attack that acts on a cooldown. Create tornadoes to pull in foes or deadly lightning strikes. As you successfully survive the storm, these spells grow even mightier. The epic wizard duels that occur at the end of a match, especially when teams coordinate during the clash, are something to behold.
Progression and Cosmetics
There’s more to being a battle royale than just dumping players onto an island. This genre goes hand in hand with the live service model, adjusting the game’s design to keep players playing for a long time. As a free-to-play game, Spellbreak also wants to keep players paying for a long time.
However, Spellbreak’s progression system didn’t grab me nearly as strong as its fundamental gameplay did. I didn’t care about obvious quests such as open 25 chests or do 300 points of wind damage. Your most meaningful reward for leveling up your rank in each element is access to new passive perks. Equip up to three talents: Mind, Body, and Soul. To keep things balanced, you always have six points to spend, and stronger talents are more expensive. Stronger talents also come with stronger weaknesses, like extra inventory but at the cost of longer cooldowns. So while you gain more options the longer you play, you don’t necessarily become objectively superior to rivals. That's good for balance, but also means I occasionally forget the progression system even exists.
Beyond that, everything else is just cosmetic. Unlock (or pay for) various costumes, badges, emotes, and other digital trinkets. I enjoy Spellbreak’s aesthetic, which I talk about in a bit, but I didn’t find any of these individual costumes compelling enough to purchase with my own money. Maybe that’s just my dislike of generic fantasy, I don’t care for ragged cloaks or medieval armor. Even if you take out the pricey licensed characters, Fortnite’s array of expressive wardrobe options do a much better, if more cynical, job of inducing the FOMO that gets people to open their wallets. So I should thank Spellbreak for being a free-to-play game I feel perfectly satisfied not paying for.
Fortunately, if you do buy into Spellbreak’s ecosystem, know that your account and progress will carry with you on any device you play the game on. During my testing, I seamlessly hopped between the PC version (exclusively on Epic Games Store at the time of testing) and Nintendo Switch version. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Cross-play multiplayer keeps the player base healthy and large—I never had trouble quickly getting into a match. Aside from one crash to a black screen, I experienced no technical or connection issues during my many hours of play, either.
A Legendary Look
Battle royale games smartly figured out that post-apocalyptic worlds make for great murder playgrounds. What happens with Spellbreak marries that idea to the fantasy genre? Basically, you get The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. From deserts packed with treasure to verdant fields of ruined castles, Spellbreak’s impressive, attractive, and sizable map looks very much like Nintendo’s open-world epic, down to the colorful but washed-out melancholy of its cel-shaded art style. The rousing musical score and crunchy power sound effects do justice to the crackling, bursting, dramatic, and epic elemental action on screen.
This isn’t a bad thing—far from it. Breath of the Wild is a beautiful game to take inspiration from, and Spellbreak’s battle royale gameplay is such a departure from Zelda’s action-adventure gameplay that it doesn’t feel like a rip-off at all. Fans of the Netflix show The Dragon Prince may also feel at home in this world.
Can Your PC Run Spellbreak?
The stylized look also helps Spellbreak perform well on a variety of hardware. Your PC needs at least a 2.7GHz Intel Core i5-6400 CPU, a Nvidia GeForce GT 640 or Radeon R7 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and Windows 7, 8.1, or 10 operating system. The download is 13.23GB. Even my aging HP Envy 17 laptop managed to run at a generally smooth 30 frames per second. On PC, you can adjust various graphical settings and set framerate caps (up to 240FPS) or unlock it completely.
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Casts a Spell on You
I said I don’t like battle royale games, but that’s not exactly true. I just tend to gravitate towards the ones that revolve around something other than who can shoot a gun the best. Give me Tetris 99, give me Fall Guys, give me Super Mario Bros. 35. Spellbreak is technically closer to a shooter than any of those examples, but its magical mayhem feels so much fresher than the latest, interchangeable military sim. Spellbreak's mechanics and aesthetic are strong enough to make it worth playing right now—in the future, the developers might need some stronger hooks and more enticing rewards to keep players engaged, though.
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Spellbreak’s fast-paced, high-flying, explosive fantasy combat makes for a battle royale that anyone can enjoy.
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