Dragon Ball: The Breakers Review In Progress – Beta Impressions

As far as the tutorial’s story goes, there’s a quick explanation about Temporal Seams that cause supervillains to show up where they’re not supposed to, but it’s not much more than a means for Trunks to tell you how to play and explain why these endless multiplayer battles keep happening. It’s better than a page of text, but that’s a low bar and doesn’t make it particularly interesting.

Dead By Dragon Ball

Playing as a Survivor (either as your customized avatar or one of the weaker characters from the show) as you scramble to achieve several goals in order to send the Raider back to where they came from gives the opening moments of a match a good sense of momentum. These tasks take the form of searching for power keys and planting them in the right spot, and protecting different machines from being destroyed by the Raider. Since the Raider is so overwhelmingly powerful when compared to the Survivors, it’s fun to be forced to survive mainly through hiding and various forms of subterfuge, such as skills that allow you to take the shape of a random object, or stun your enemy for a short time.

The heartstopping moments where you don’t really know whether or not the Raider has seen you can be genuinely fun, pushing you to improvise quickly. Because the penalty for being spotted without a plan is almost certainly death, this leads to some incredibly tense interactions where it truly feels like you can outsmart your enemy. It’s raw power versus creativity, and these moments were often the high I was chasing while playing as a Survivor.

These moments are genuinely tense.

Unfortunately, the controls and camera are frequently subpar. While moving around, your character is often placed at the edge of the frame as if the camera’s not really sure what to focus on, and it gives the feeling that you’re just sliding around from side to side on screen. This is doubly true when trying to aim long-range skills, such as grappling hooks or rocket launchers. It makes total sense that you should be at a disadvantage when facing a Raider, but not because your character is a chore to control.

Other than their equippable skills, the true ace in the hole for Survivors is the Dragon Change, which is the ability to transform into super powered versions of your character based on various Dragon Ball heroes. These come in the form of Transpheres, items you receive from a gacha mechanic using tickets – I’m still getting a feel for how that works in terms of balance in a typical match, but that sort of interaction between competitive gameplay and gacha is at least a little bit worrisome on the surface. After transforming into the hero of your choice, you can take the fight to the raider for a short amount of time in order to give your fellow survivors more time to escape.

While this is a cool concept, my complaints about the controls and camera are intensified while moving at a high speed after a Dragon Change. I frequently had trouble targeting my enemy, even while locked on, and couldn’t aim any beam attacks for the life of me. When they did manage to connect, the lack of visual feedback made me confused as to what was even going on. It felt like a poor imitation of a Dragon Ball Budokai game, with flailing rather than fighting. I definitely need more time with the Dragon Change mechanic to see if I can better wrap my head around how it feels, but what I’ve played so far controls very poorly and the camera just can’t keep up.

I generally had more fun playing as a Raider rather than a Survivor, hunting down helpless citizens and destroying their toys before they could be used to escape me. It’s satisfying to absorb a survivor after defeating them and grow into a new form with new skills (especially since you get to destroy a huge portion of the map every time), but even when you add in the power fantasy, attacks lack impact, the camera is a frustration to deal with, and the lack of good visual feedback made it difficult to tell what was going on. The only difference was that I had the speed and power to compensate for these mechanical shortcomings, while my Survivor opponents did not.

The graphics certainly won’t be winning any awards either. While the characters retain their style from the source material and the map is nicely varied with canyons, towns, and wide-open spaces, most of the textures are low-res and blurry up close. I wasn’t really expecting incredible visuals that reach the high bar set by a game like Dragon Ball FighterZ, but after seeing how good a Dragon Ball game could look it’s a shame that this one is so visually dull.

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