dragon ball has seen dozens of video game adaptations over the years, but the franchise still manages to squeeze out wildly different experiences. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is easily one of the most unique Dragon Ball games, and its ambition is obvious. But ambition can only take you so far The breakers still has a lot of work to do, even if its fundamentals are surprisingly strong overall.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an asymmetric multiplayer game in the same style as Dead by daylight, which pits six human survivors against iconic villains like Frieza, Cell, and Majin Buu. One player controls the raider and is tasked with hunting down the survivors, while the other six must team up and find “Power Keys” that activate a Super Time Machine that restores the world.
Any game of The breakers takes place on a map divided into different zones, with survivors being randomly dropped across the map. Before matches, you can choose your setup and equip two key factors: Skills and Transspheres.
Skills essentially give you extremely valuable pieces of gear that are set on cooldowns, such as: B. a grappling hook or smokescreen. transferson the other hand, allow you to harness the powers of Z warriors like Goku and Piccolo for a chance to fight back against the Breaker on more level ground.
This is directly related to the items you collect during the games. As you explore, you’ll find various chests and breakable objects that contain money, helpful utility items, and Power Cubes that charge your D-Change gauge, which allows you to use Transpheres.
All of these factors offer a wealth of different approaches and character builds, as well as many useful tools for survivors to assert themselves. That’s where The crusherHowever, his biggest flaw is starting to show: for all the tools Survivors have, the game is still weighted way too much in favor of the Raider.
Survivors are incredibly squishy — as you would expect — and often fall to the ground in one fell swoop. It would be fine, except for the fact that the raider can very You can easily latch onto and hit a survivor from across the map, and Frieza and Majin Buu also gain abilities that allow them to see the locations of nearby survivors. There’s clearly some balancing to be done in this regard, but glitches and shaky gameplay only add to the game’s problems.
It is clear that The breakers was created on a smaller budget than some other similar games, but one of the most unnecessarily annoying factors is that your character doesn’t stay in the center of the screen. Motion is smooth, but can be distracting as you move around the screen and are forced to constantly adjust the camera for the right view.
At the same time, there are some strange ways character models interact, especially in melee combat. The breakers is not a fighting game, but its mechanics are reminiscent of Dragon Ball Xenoverse, but not nearly as fine-tuned. Melee attacks just don’t hit To the right often. The same goes for energy attacks; it often feels like you could have dodged a ranged attack when instead it chases and hits you.
Even more frustrating is your D-Change transformation, your primary way of fighting back. While it’s a good idea in theory, the Raider can deplete your Polymorph HP in just an attack or two, even if you’ve maxed out your gauge, which in and of itself is an excruciatingly high amount of work.
The other aspect worth noting is the game’s terrible progression system and surprisingly aggressive monetization. A variety of daily and weekly challenges let you increase your dragon level, which in turn rewards various stickers, cosmetics, and in-game currency. This currency can be used to unlock new abilities and cosmetics, but it is primarily used in the game’s gacha system, which unlocks new transspheres.
The Spirit Siphon system lets you spend money and summon tickets to unlock new Transspheres, but the problem is that getting a Transsphere doesn’t mean you unlock all of its features. Each transsphere has different abilities, forms, special attacks, and costumes, but you only get one or two of these for each gacha move.
This means that to complete even one Transphere you’ll likely need to make a lot of moves, but the game spends currency at such a sluggish pace that it takes forever to win enough to make more than one or two . The game just doesn’t consistently reward the player, which is a problem for an experience based solely on the sense of reward.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers review — The final result
Advantages
- Strong concept that feels really unique.
- Playing as a raider can be a blast.
- Working with a good team and winning feels incredibly rewarding.
Disadvantages
- Huge balancing issues with Raiders power.
- Slow progress and aggressive monetization.
- The single game mode wears off after a while.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers has a lot of great ideas at its core and it’s an experience like no other. Playing as an average survivor is a great thing dragon ball series, and when a team really works together and asserts itself, that’s a serious high with an intense sense of reward.
The problem is, those wins are few and far between because The breakers has such bad balancing issues in terms of raider power. Because of this, playing as a raider can be a great thing, but anything else can quickly lead to an overall sense of defeat.
Simultaneously, The crusherThe gameplay’s unique mode can wear off after a few hours, and the game’s success generally depends on how well Bandai Namco can support it in the months to come. If serious changes can be made to the progression system and balancing, in addition to providing meaningful new content, Dragon Ball: The Breakers could be something special. As it stands now, however, it’s a half-baked experience that’s equal parts frustration and fun.
[Note: Bandai Namco provided the copy of Dragon Ball: The Breakers used for this review.]
