Sometimes, combining two existing great things can lead to something even better. In Dragon Ball: The Breakers, Dragon Ball’s iconic battles and characters are combined with the intense combat of asymmetric multiplayer. Seven civilian “Survivors” (power levels nowhere near 9000) face off against a powerful “Raider”, playing as Cell, Boo or Frieza. Who doesn’t want to experience Battle Purcell like a normal person? At around €20 or £20 at launch on PC, Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, the potential for a great game that won’t break the bank is there, but how does it play in practice?
Let’s talk about single player first. I remember Dragon Ball episodes that could endlessly pull out the story, it’s easy to use three or four episodes to show a fight. Dragon Ball: Destroyer is pretty much the opposite: the game’s entire single-player story has just one tutorial, complete in under 15 minutes. In short, Cell attacks the city you live in, and Trunks come in from the future to save you. However, things don’t quite go according to plan, and you’re sucked into a “time gap” in the chaos of space and time. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll be on a floating platform that serves as a multiplayer lobby and where you buy cosmetic items and unlock characters.
When starting a multiplayer match, your character is sucked back into the temporal gap, where marauders await you. The main goal for you and the other survivors is to escape the time gap by summoning and escaping with a time machine. The different stages in the game mimic other successful asymmetric multiplayer games like Dead by Daylight or Predator: Hunting Grounds. In the opening phase, you focus on placing the six “power buttons” that invoke the time machine. Survivors have access to a variety of gadgets, including Transgender, which lets you briefly play as iconic fighters like Piccolo or Goku to fight or flee from more powerful predators. Cable guns, smoke grenades, and trampolines can get you out of danger quickly. When playing as a raider, you obviously have to do everything you can to stop the survivors and destroy the time machine.
Here is an ad:
While not as terrifying as Dead by Daylight, I did find the matches pretty thrilling. As a survivor, I usually start by looking for power-ups and power-keys, but I like to focus on reviving as many downed teammates as possible. As more and more survivors are knocked down or killed by the attackers, the attackers become stronger and survival becomes more difficult. The saboteur manages to provide quite a bit of tension when you’re dodging Perfect Cell or Frieza, because you know you’re almost dead when the attacker finds you and manages to get close. That’s probably why there are seven survivors, which is a pretty high number because most of the time you don’t have a chance at all. The distraction of the attackers killing other people is the only reason I’m still alive most of the time. The music and heartbeats intensify as the raiders approached, and I enjoyed this mix of panic and fun most of the time.
The iconic Dragon Ball battle is largely limited to the brief moments in which the survivors use the aforementioned cross-spheres. For about 30 seconds, you can fire balls of energy, teleport to dodge, throw some kicks and punches, and even use special attacks like my favorite: Piccolo’s special beam cannon. You can always do these things while playing as a raider. From my current experience, as long as you play with more experienced players, real Dragon Ball battles will become more common, as they know when to initiate a cross orb at the right time. In fact, in a typical Dragon Ball fight, I was defeated this way by a team of survivors because they were all attacking me at the same time.
At times, games can feel a little unfair. Matchmaking seems to throw all player levels into one big bowl to fill up the lobby, which means you’ll often see beginners mixed with more advanced players. I’ve had a few matches that ended pretty quickly as a seasoned raider battled a bunch of beginners, including myself. However, you could say that this part is inherent to asymmetric matching. I’ve managed to win very little as a survivor so far, but it seems to me that you’ll need to play Destroyer a bit longer to really get the hang of its tactical gameplay elements.
Here is an ad:
Graphically, Dragon Ball: Breakers looks great when you look at the characters up close. The world you walk around is colorful and looks exactly like a Dragon Ball cartoon. On the other hand, I am very disappointed by the lack of depth in this department. For example, just before you control the start of the match, all characters move in exactly the same way as a set of clones. When I first observed this, it felt like I was playing on a PlayStation 1: how much effort would it take to slightly change the timing of the same animation in the loading scene for different characters in 2022?
The lack of variety and visual assets is also evident in the game environment. The game has you fighting in a clearly recognizable Dragon Ball environment, but unfortunately, the map feels pretty empty. Wherever you go, there is nothing to see. Watching the game’s trailer, I pictured myself hiding among the typical Dragon Ball buildings, cars, and crowds as a civilian. In reality, the urban portion of the map is nothing more than a group of highly similar buildings with little detail to bring them to life. I’d love to see more of this, although I must admit it becomes less noticeable when you play the game more often and pay more attention to the game’s combat and objectives.
The playable characters in the game are diverse enough that others may be included in the future. Playing as different raiders adds some variety, and it’s also possible to play as your own unique survivor, or as Bulma or Oolong with alternate special abilities. In the case of an oolong, you can transform into a chair or a large planter to hide, which is fun and exciting. Unfortunately, a lot of extra content seems to be hidden behind microtransactions. There are so many different currencies and tokens in the game that I can’t actually tell which ones can be purchased for free and which ones can’t be purchased without paying actual money or honing in on them for years.
Overall, my feelings about Dragon Ball: The Breakers are mixed. On the one hand, it offers in terms of asymmetric multiplayer. It’s usually exciting, the game’s characters come to life, and I have an urge to get better at winning. On the other hand, environments are bland, animations are minimal, there is too much currency in the game, and because all player levels are jumbled up, not all matches are equally fun. In the end, it seems like Dragon Ball Meets Asymmetric Multiplayer might be better than what Dragon Ball: Destroyer has to offer, which is a real shame.