REVIEW: ‘Dragon Ball: The Breakers’ Has An Interesting Premise But Mediocre Execution (PS5)

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an asymmetric online multiplayer game set in the beloved Dragon Ball universe. Developed by DIMPS and published by Bandai Namco, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

In Dragon Ball: The Breakers, players are caught up in a temporal phenomenon known as the Temporal Seam. This Temporal Seam traps seven ordinary civilians with popular villains from the Dragon Ball franchise, referred to as “raiders” in the game. The idea is that the survivors need to work together to escape the Temporal Seam using the Super Time Machine before the villain becomes too powerful and defeats them. That is really all there is story-wise, with the primary focus of the game being the gameplay itself. It’s a really neat premise, especially because the Dragon Ball villains are some of the best villains in anime, and putting them up against ordinary civilians with no powers makes for quite the challenge.

The problem with Dragon Ball: The Breakers is that so much of that potential is squandered. The gameplay loop is extremely repetitive, especially for the survivors. There are only three maps currently in the game, and survivors have to rotate between closed-off areas of the maps while opening boxes to find keys and other useful items to escape. While some items can be extremely helpful, the cooldown times are quite frustrating, and much of the core gameplay boils down to just walking around trying to avoid the raider. Raider gameplay is pretty fun, especially as the survivors get more powerful, which makes the wins can feel more rewarding, but because of the 7-on-1 nature of the game, it is much harder to get the chance to play as a raider. Combat controls on both sides also feel relatively cumbersome, and the camera is incredibly wonky to the point of being distracting at times.

There is a clear difference between playing as a survivor and as a raider, which can feel incredibly frustrating. Survivors often feel completely powerless, which works in the context of what the game is trying to do, but after a few games gets pretty old. Raiders, on the other hand, feel almost invincible and take an incredible amount of skill or luck to defeat. I’m hoping to see some balancing work in the future that evens things out, making it so that one side doesn’t feel completely hopeless while the other feels unbeatable. I think the balance can be found, especially by tweaking some of the cooldown times, but it’s not there yet.

My biggest issue with Dragon Ball: The Breakers is the heavy emphasis on gacha mechanics in a game that is not free-to-play. There are things in the game called “dragon change,” which allow players to become more powerful, and there are also items that can be used, like Vegeta’s Saiyan pod remote, which had to be nerfed already since it was a bit too powerful. Those upgrades are received through the gacha mechanics in the game’s overworld hub and can feel extremely pay-to-win when the luck isn’t going your way. Gacha mechanics can feel frustrating in general, even if they do make sense in a free-to-play game, but Dragon Ball: The Breakers is not free to play. It’s incredibly disappointing when players are driven to purchase a chance to drop game-changing items in a game that they already had to pay for.

While there is quite a bit about Dragon Ball: The Breakers that frustrated me, that doesn’t mean that the game is entirely disappointing. There were several moments when I was able to win as both the survivor and raider that felt really rewarding. Plus, getting to play around in the Dragon Ball sandbox is always entertaining as a fan of the franchise. It feels great to customize your own character and have them appear in a universe that feels distinctly Dragon Ball, which helps overcome some of the main gameplay issues I had. Most of the issues are also things that can be fixed going forward, which leaves me feeling optimistic about the future of Dragon Ball: The Breakers.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.