Dragon Ball: The Breakers

Despite iffy monetization choices and the general feeling that the game might not last long enough to become a permanent part of your rotation, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is a frantic and fast-paced interpretation of a genre otherwise saturated in horror movie tropes. Steeped in fun Dragon Ball in-jokes and goofy humor, there’s there’s a lot of slapstick joy to be found in the game, so much so that it wouldn’t be out of place if the Benny Hill theme kicked in every so often.

DRAGON BALL: The Breakers is a good idea held back by Pay-to-Win practices and outdated design decisions. While the game could have a bright future ahead of it, it has a long way to go before it can be considered a truly great title, and really ought to sort out it’s current issues before the developers look ahead to Seasons 2 and beyond. The fundamentals are there, and the gameplay is solid; if these can be polished and modernised, then Breakers would easily go from a niche oddity to a raging blast.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is the latest game to cash in on the cat-and-mouse multiplayer boom. Unfortunately, it does so without any of the mechanical depth that makes those games great.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers feels like a lackluster experience that in spite of being able to give the player some good moments, falls extremely short. It is awful from a technical standpoint, but it also misses the point on key elements such as the matchmaking or the balance between survivor and villain. In all honesty: it should have been a free-to-play game.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is a crude and poor video game, but it is not lacking in inventiveness. What I’m wondering is if, unlike other similar multiplayer titles, it will have time to evolve and improve over time, or if Bandai Namco will put an end to its service before the game formula is refined and enriched as it needs to be.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers will probably live or die based on its initial release window. It is a game of growing pains so severe that it might scare off much of the audience. What that could leave is akin to a late-stage fighting game: the only players left are very good, forcing away even more newcomers. If players can get over this hurdle, and the one that simply playing the game provides, there's a depth to the mechanics that are satisfying to master. It is a game that offers a bit more complexity than competitor Dead By Daylight, but would have to sustain a player base to truly match it. Failing that, it could end another Friday The 13th; a totally fine game that can only be enjoyed with friends. As it stands now, though, a private game cannot exist without a full lobby of eight players, so even that might not be a realistic option. In a world with a glut of this genre, it doesn't do quite enough to require your time.

The developers of Dimps had set themselves the goal of offering a peculiar asymmetrical multiplayer with a Dragon Ball theme, capable of immersing players in the tension of a game between cat and mouse lived on a tightrope. Unfortunately, due to a clear imbalance between the experience with villain and that in the role of the survivors, Dragon Ball: The Breakers fails to hit the mark, also given the only game mode present and the small number of maps available.