Shipping Giant Amazon Lets PC Players Try New Game Breakaway Free Until Monday
So Amazon Game Studios is a thing. Yep, you heard right! The same Amazon that basically runs half the internet, is now directly involved in game publishing. This weekend, PC players can download and play the alpha version of Amazon’s new MOBA, Breakaway.  The game has been in development for some time along with two other, very different, titles and has quite the following of players eagerly waiting to get their hands on some early gameplay.  Breakaway will be free for anyone with a Windows PC from now until December 19th at 10:00am pacific time.
Breakaway is a 3rd person, team based, competitive multiplayer game. Â It is a bit of a combination of games like Smite, Dungeon Defenders, and good old basketball. Â Two teams of four take to the battlefield as fantasy tropes like the Black Knight or Morgan Le Fay, and battle to move a relic into a score zone in the home base of the opposing team. Â Unlike most MOBAs today, this game will be round based and will have multiple victory conditions, potentially offering some more frantic, fast paced gameplay than your traditional MOBA. Â Your team can score a win by chucking the relic into the other team’s hoop, by killing the entire enemy team before they have a chance to respawn, or by having the relic in enemy territory when the timer runs out. Simply by having these multiple win conditions and a countdown timer, Breakaway could do away with some of the genres more annoying aspects. It will be impossible to get stuck in an hour long game of back and forth between two fully maxed out teams in Breakaway as players have to keep an eye on the timer as well as battlefield position, and possession of the relic. Check out the trailer below:
Defensive tactics will factor heavily in Breakaway, as each playable character has a couple deployables like turrets, walls, or healing stations that they can earn during combat and place between rounds. Instead of having to run or teleport back to your home base to defend against an attack, players can potentially set up choke points or gauntlets of turrets to do the defending for them, while they hunt down enemy players or coordinate a run of the relic.  There are currently 8 announced playable characters, which is low for a game like this, but as Breakaway is still in alpha, we can expect there to be plenty more characters announced as Amazon marches toward the launch date.  This free to play weekend will also debut a 9th playable character simply called, Victor, a very slow character with some great range and burst damage.
If you are a fan of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games and you own a PC, you owe it to yourself to give this new upstart a try. Â The MOBA is a relatively simple concept with some amazing support as of late. Â The genre is getting honed and polished by all the hands working on various interpretations and it feels like they keep getting better and better. Â We as gamers will ultimately decide which of these games are successful, and the more we show our support by playing, or our dissatisfaction by not playing, the more we will also have a hand in shaping this unique genre!