DRAGON BALL: The Breakers is an online asymmetrical action multiplayer co-op action developed by Dimps and published by Bandai Namco for PC and all major consoles.
In Dragon Ball: The Breakers you play as a survivor – a character you create for yourself or a low-level character from the original series, or as one of the Raiders, where you play as a villain from the original Dragon Ball Z series.
The game’s premise is you keep getting sucked into Time Portals due to one of the series villains ending up in a timeline they don’t belong to, and your mission is to find power keys for each zone, which are used to call and activate A Super Time Machine.
During your search for the keys, you will come across civilians that you can try to save, the infamous Dragonballs and a variety of weapons.
Much like Dead by Daylight and other similar games, you are either part of a team of seven survivors or you can play as the Raider. But in my time playing, I never got the chance to play as a Raider, with the wait time being far too long.
You do get to play as some of your favourite heroes, kind of. You can acquire transpheres of the different heroes from the series through different gatcha purchases at the rest hub using in-game currency but there is also a season pass as well there is also purchasable currency.
The game doesn’t really have a story outside of the tutorial, which to be frankly honest is a poor attempt at explaining that you’ve been pulled into a time portal.
The tutorial doesn’t really teach the controls properly either – not that I think it would matter if it did, as the controls are very clunky and very lacklustre.
The camera controls do leave a lot to be desired and you might as well be a thin cloth over your eyes the majority of the time; as you can never really keep track of the Raider invader properly and the camera will get stuck on buildings and other objects on the map.
This unfortunately makes it hard to enjoy the gameplay as you spend more time focusing on trying to get your character movement to respond correctly or trying to dislodge the camera as it’s stuck in a wall and you can’t see – such as when you happen to hit that unlucky gap in the environment and sink into a doorway of a building, unable to get out or you’re scanning the whole surface of a cliff that a hook action should work on, just to find where the hook will catch on too.
And that’s not to mention the difficulty of the controls increasing when you activate Dragon Change – a crucial part of the gameplay, as it allows you to change into warriors from the Dragon Ball Universe for a limited time and gives you a fighting chance against the Raider.
Unfortunately, my experience with Dragon Ball: The Breakers hasn’t been very positive, but I suspect it’ll be a game for a niche group of people who can overlook the flaws or are willing to stick around for future content.
