LifeisXbox’s Dragon Ball: The Breakers review | It seems to be a growing trend as of late, survival games where you are being put up against one big evil. The biggest name out there is I think Dead by Daylight. So, of course, other companies will try to catch a piece of the pie while it’s still hot before the fad peeters off into nothingness. Enter, Dragon Ball: The Breakers brought to us by Dimps! Honestly, I get it. The DB universe tends to lend itself to this kind of genre since we mostly see these stories unfold before our very eyes in the show. A baddy shows up, and a motley crew of earth defenders gathers, they fight, grow stronger, fight some more, and eventually unalive the villain. So when I got the chance to grab this up for reviewing purposes? I went for it, hard. But little was my enthusiasm before it got its head fully dashed in by the state of the game when it was first released! I couldn’t review it like this… I thought, hey, it got a rough start. And as a DB fan, I really wanted to give it a fair shot. I’m sorry to say, that after all this time? Little to no improvements were made… A sad time was upon me, especially while writing this review… Want to know why? Then wait no longer and delve into our review of… Dragon Ball: The Breakers…
Most Memorable Moment
My most memorable moment was when I got to summon in Picollo and fight against Frieza together with another person that summoned in Goku. Honestly, that just felt bad-ass!
ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox Series X | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion of the writer.
What we Liked!
- Nothing | There is actually nothing fun about this…
Mixed Feelings
- Waiting and waiting and… | Oh heck yeah! Finally home, let’s get a quick game in … You won’t say, ever. Since the release of this game, I’ve found that getting into a lobby and having a game sesh took me more than 10+ minutes of waiting. Now it’s been a while, and I withheld myself from writing this review in the hopes that this would’ve just been a release thing. But nope. You could say that the server population is still quite barren. It still takes around 7 to 8 minutes before your lobby fills up and finally getting that ‘sweet’ time in. And even then there will be players either disconnecting or just being AFK from the controller.
- Gameplay | The entirety of Breakers just feels… Awkward and clunky. The game starts with you being dropped in the world that you choose. You are all scattered everywhere. Though you tend to drop with one or two teammates, depending on how the RNG decides to spawn you in. But though you start off as a tiny group, you quickly will notice that everyone just… Scurries off to do their own thing. Your main goal is to find a set amount of keys so you can power the machine to restore the timeline. If you spawn in as a villain, it is your task to prevent them from gathering all of these keys. At times you’ll be able to destroy certain zones, which means that even if they get a key for a particular zone (since they are all designated a destination), you can screw them over royally by just… blasting that zone to smithereens. Do enough things? And you’ll eventually evolve since that’s a thing as well. As a villain, you start off as your weakest version. Gain enough energy, and you’ll transcend until you reach your final form. As the survivors, you’ll have to gather energy by either finding energy pockets in caches you open, or teleporting out survivors that are strewn about. Gain enough power, and you’ll be able to temporarily bring in a warrior from a team that you select (and unlock through Gacha-Esque monetization schemes) before starting your game.
In my opinion, this is one of the most useless systems I have ever seen… Calling in a warrior only is as good as the team that you are given. I’ve played quite a few rounds and have only really won a couple of them. The warrior system is there to combat the villain, but one single warrior is never enough to take down one. So, the smart choice would be to save up your energy, get the machine whirling, and then protect the people who are going to power the machine up. Yet I have only seen 1 or 2 instances where a coordinated effort was done and granted, when that happens? It’s amazing! You’ll see 2 or 3 people fly off, fighting the big baddy while the rest just tries to power the machine. Is their energy spent? Then they’ll land to help power the machine, while a couple of others fly off to fight. But mostly you’ll just see people doing their own thing, being downed and then just leaving the game because they know no one is coming in to rescue them.
- Visually lackluster | The visual engine doesn’t really do it for me either, to be honest. Everything just feels like it got delivered to do the bare minimum. Does a zone get destroyed? Woosh, a wall of blurry fire shoots up straight into the sky… Do you shoot a rocket? Pow… A tiny explosion that delivers no oomph and a stocky ragdoll effect… Like, is this 2002? No… 2022. Come on… The color scheme on the other hand is quite vibrant and gives you that instant DB feel we all love to see… But the rest? The VFX? Big OOF!
- Tutorial NO jutsu| Ah, the tutorial. The meat and bones of every new game with new mechanics and a carefully crafted combat system or environment for you to travel around. You’ll do some things here and there. Follow a short storyline. Learn some things about the story on itself and then get thrown into the wide world. … Only to find out you learned almost nothing except some rudimentary things but not the core construct of the game. You’ll actually learn a lot more from the in-game manual than the tutorial and that’s just … mindboggling. If you’re not going to use the tutorial to learn the core mechanics, then why even call it a tutorial? Call it a prelude or something, but not a tutorial.
- Looping sounds| Fan of overused sound effects and music? Then rejoice! Because The Breakers has you covered… (this is pure sarcasm by the way). You could sum this entire experience up in a few sound effects (seriously). A pew-pew sound, an elevator song (and with this I mean the waiting song), some blips and blurbs, and then some voice lines that sound uninterested and phoned in by the voice actors. Over and over again. It’s a damn shame to be honest because it’s not as if the Dragon Ball universe has gotten some great games in the past few years.
What we Disliked
- Camera | Oh, you might think that the likes of Frieza or Cell would be your worst enemy? Enter … Camera. My god how can you fuck up a camera so bad, that you would just want to throw your eyeballs out and wish upon the Dragon Balls that you could unsee this travesty? I have known static behind-the-back cameras. I’ve known top-down cameras. But never have I ever known a floating camera that moves on a separate axis that isn’t attached to your character! More times than I can remember, I lost myself on the screen because I couldn’t focus on my own damn character. And let that be one of the most key elements of this game… Your character! If ever Dimps would create a new game, let them know this. Do not use this camera system again, ever!
How long to beat the story | 30 minutes.
How long to achieve 1000G | 20+ hours.
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