A lean, electric action game that remembers combat is a craft. The campaign is short, but every encounter is sharpened to a point.
Not every action game needs a live-service roadmap and a seasonal store. Circuit Breakers is a single-player campaign with a beginning, a middle and an end, and it is all the better for its modesty. Voltage Row clearly cares about the feel of a fight — the weight of a dodge, the snap of a parry landed a half-second early.
Encounters are compact and hand-authored, each built around one or two ideas it explores fully before moving on. The story is thin and the run time short, but nothing overstays its welcome and the moment-to-moment combat is among the most satisfying we have played this year.
