Spellbreak is a battle royale with elemental magic and huge explosions

Spellbreak is an upcoming battle royale game—but before you dismiss it as just another cash-in on the genre, check out the trailer above. From the footage, I'd say it has potential: I like the pretty, fantasy art style, and characters fling elemental magic spells that interact with one another, creating giant fireball explosions, which I'm on board with.

Those magic spells come from two enchanted gauntlets that your character wears, and which ones they equip depends on their class. There are 11 classes that deal different types of damage—so far there's fire, ice, lightning, stone, wind, and poison damage, and you can combo them, casting a poison cloud and then setting it on fire to create a giant poisonous inferno, for example. You can see more examples of the fire/poison interactions in the clip below.

Each gauntlet has a primary and secondary fire. For instance, the poison gauntlet's primary fire is a focused spray, while secondary is a big poison bomb.

I like how flashy the spell effects are, and it creates some pretty hectic moments on the battlefield. Each class runs a passive ability and three scrolls that they can level up during a match to increase their power. For example, the pyromancer's passive lets them come back to life with 50% health after they're killed for the first time (which seems ridiculously powerful, but I'll reserve judgement for now), while their scrolls let them heal themselves with fire, set enemies alight and create lingering puddles of flames when they use spells.

It's currently in pre-alpha, and you can sign up to test it here. It doesn't yet have a release date. If you want to find out more, the best place is developer Proletariat Games' imgur page, where it posts developer updates.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.