By Shenron, what have they done?! The only thing Dragon Ball: The Breakers is ‘breaking’ is the record for how quickly a game has paralysed me with frustration and boredom. I have a lot to say about this game but, unfortunately, none of it is good.
The concept introduced and shown off in the announcement trailers looked fairly solid but its execution has been exactly that: an execution. I played an hour solo and two hours with Luke, and if it wasn’t for the presence of alcohol and the opportunity to complain about the game to someone else it would have been a truly mind-numbing session.
The graphics are reminiscent of the PlayStation 2 era, particularly in the sense that the Budokai and Tenkaichi games looked, and still look, better. Gameplay consists of flying around a sparse and isolated map avoiding another player controlling Frieza, Cell or Buu, in game referred to as the Raider. You are trying to locate buttons scattered around chests in the environment in order to activate a Super Time Machine to escape a ‘Temporal Seam’ your character is trapped in, along with six other survivors. Communication is kept fortunately minimal between you which I expect is to limit players informing each other that the game they’re playing is rubbish.
During the session, you will occasionally gain the ability to briefly take on the abilities of a Z fighter, though all this really does is allow the convenient ability of flight, as well as make you more easy to find for the Raider. I kept trying to play as the Raider, but as I expect literally every other player was attempting to do the same I never got the opportunity to play as them myself.
The only remotely positive thing I can think of is that it’s at least playable, with no bugs or crashes when I played on launch. That said, I gained no enjoyment from my experience whatsoever. The potential is there for fun to be patched in at a later date with overhauled mechanics but for now I can’t recommend this to anyone, even the die hard Dragon Ball fans.
I refuse to put in more effort than the developers did so I’m not even going to finish this review. Luke, instant transmission in!
Luke
Dragon Ball: The Breakers is one of the most horrible renditions of the 5VS1 genre that I have ever played. It somehow takes everything that makes those games fun and ruins it. You are given an opportunity to fight back as your standard survivor but this is so incredibly hollow that they may as well have not lazily shoehorned this in in the first place. I did have fun turning into heroes briefly during the games I played but this was few and far between and didn’t do enough to separate me from the survivors I had control of in the early stages of each game.
The Breakers has the potential to be a fantastic game but with these mechanics in place it squanders every one of those opportunities and in its current state is not a game I can recommend to anybody at all.
Alexx again. To summarise, don’t waste your time with The Breakers. They may patch in a better game in the future but I know I’m not sticking around to see if they do. A strong concept severely let down by lazy development which is only getting a score higher than 1 because it technically works and didn’t cause my PS5 to burst into flames. It only burst into tears, and no amount of Senzu beans can make it feel better.
2 / 10
Written by Alexx and Luke.
Edited by Alexx.