I was able to get a chance to play the Open Beta of Dragon Ball: The Breakers during this last weekend. I can easily say that, even though I wasn’t able to get into a full or proper match, I really did enjoy what I was able to play. Also, before I get talking about the game, I tried it out on both the Switch and PC versions.
The Breakers is Dragon Ball’s take on the asymmetrical multiplayer games. Inspired by the scenario from Cell’s attack, The Breakers lets you play as either a survivor or a raider. Survivors must find Power Keys that let them call the Super Time Machine, which would let them escape. While that’s the main objective, there’s also alternate methods for the survivors to win. And as a raider, the objective is to simply eliminate all survivor players before they can escape.
The maps in this game are actually quite big compared to other games of this type. This is something I actually liked because raiders can move pretty fast. This also makes the world and scenario a bit more realistic. In a way, The Breakers feels like a game that combines the asymmetric multiplayer game with the Battle Royale style of games. And as raider becomes stronger, they can even destroy sections of the map, giving the survivors less places to hide or find resources on.
The controls are very responsive which is something I really appreciated. There’s no clunkiness to it or sluggishness. As soon as you press a command, the game responds exactly as you would expect. My only complaint, though, would be that the gamepad controls do feel very convoluted. It’s like they overthought too much what each button does and it really doesn’t feel intuitive. Once you start getting used to them, though, it’s a very enjoyable experience. But hopefully, the developers make this part a bit more easy to grasp right from the beginning.
My other complaint so far would be that the new player experience is really bad. The game starts with a tutorial that is really basic and only covers things from the survivor point of view. There’s no tutorial for raiders, for gathering the dragon balls, or for most of the items you’ll encounter. There’s nothing about the skills you can learn, even the ones you start with. Besides the tutorial, the only other guides the game has to help you learn how to play are in the form of small tips during loading screens and through a big help menu with a lot of text that no one will want to go through. Both of them, though, are still pretty barebones and won’t give you all the information needed.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers will launch on October 14. It’s honestly a pretty fun game that has a lot of potential to become a unique experience among its competitors due to it taking place in the Dragon Ball world. The big map and responsive controls make for a pleasant experience. Playing as raider honestly does make you feel as one of the villains too. Considering they didn’t make it free to play, I honestly hope that Bandai Namco decides to add cross-play to it at least as a game like this heavily relies on having a good population of players to even be playable.
Link-NM is the administrator of N Masters, Makendo Central, and aspiring indie game developer at NovaFan Games. His favorite game franchises include Mega Man X, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario Kart.