Game review: Dragon Ball: The Breakers

Historically, there have been two main genres that Dragon Ball games have become. The most obvious genre is fighting games, as seen with the likes of the excellently made Dragon Ball FighterZ from a few years ago. The other genre is the action RPG with fighting game elements like Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. 
 
2022 however, brings us something different from the Dragon Ball franchise as Bandai Namco has released Dragon Ball: The Breakers. Instead of being a traditional fighting game, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an online-only multiplayer survival game. 

Dragon Ball: The Breakers follows the pattern of other similar games like Dead by Daylight and Predator: Hunting Grounds. In these games, one player plays as a monster that has to kill all the other members of the opposing team. 

In Dragon Ball: The Breakers, the game is a 1v7 game where the monsters are the characters of Cell, Frieza, or Buu. The remaining seven players are normal characters that don't have the special powers of Goku or any of the other Z fighters. 

A cool thing about Dragon Ball: The Breakers is that it includes a pretty lengthy tutorial guided by the character of Trunks. You can create your own human character, and he will tell you what you need to do in order to survive the attacks of the enemy character. 
 
Surprisingly, the tutorial doesn't teach you how to be Cell, Frieza, and Buu as a raider. If you get accepted as a raider, you'll have to figure out what to do by yourself because, sadly, the game does not tell you their controls. 

Another great thing about the game is that it includes a very helpful Practice mode. In the Practice mode, you can pretty much learn what you need to do in order to survive before you start playing with and against real online players. You can use the practice mode as many times as you want before you decide to start playing the game for real. 

Before you start the game, you can choose how you want to fight and the specific skin you want to play as. For example, you're free to play as your created character, or you can play as some other famous Dragon Ball characters. Some of the other character skins you can play as include Bulma and Oolong the pig.

For a temporary amount of time, you can also fight as a Z fighter if you collect the right amount of power-ups. You can mimic the moves of Piccolo, Krillin, Goku, and more. However, you can only fight as a Z fighter for a short time as your power runs out!

There are several different ways that you can win matches as a team in Dragon Ball: The Breakers. The hardest way to win as a team is to deplete the life bar of the Raider. In order to do this, you can either use a bazooka, or fight as a team using the temporary powers you get from the Z fighters. 
 
After playing this game for many hours, I only managed to win in this way only once during my playthrough. You will probably only win this way if you have a strong team full of experienced players. 

The easier way to win is by escaping the Raider by powering up the time machine. In order to win in this fashion, you have to find five Power Keys that are located all around the map. You will need to find a Dragon Radar if you want to locate the Power Keys faster. 

Although this is the "easier" way to win, the Raider can still spoil your fun by destroying the time machine. You will have to defend the time machine from getting destroyed if you want to escape and survive this whole ordeal. 

If you are a Raider, you can easily win this game by killing all of the survivors. Raiders are pretty powerful in this game, as they can also destroy an entire section of the map with ease! As aforementioned, they can also destroy the time machine to prevent anyone from escaping. 

Bear in mind, each match only lasts for 15 minutes. If you cannot achieve your goals, you pretty much lose, and the Raider will destroy you. It goes without saying that the Raider is pretty overpowered in this game, so a lot of teamwork is needed for you to win matches. 

To me, Dragon Ball: The Breakers isn't very balanced because the Raiders are too powerful, in my opinion. Even when you temporarily change to have Z fighter powers, they don't really do much damage. If the Raider finds you while you're hiding, you can die in an instant.

Another thing I don't like about this game is the bugs, glitches, and connection errors I experienced. Not to mention it can take a very long time to find a match because I don't think many people are playing this game on Xbox platforms. Hopefully, things can get better with future update patches.

The game is also not free-to-play, and it contains a lack of content. Dragon Ball: The Breakers only features one game mode and three maps. If you are playing on consoles, you will also have to pay for an online subscription to play too!

For a game with no single-player mode, I feel the game should have had way more content. It remains to be seen if free DLC is on the way, but right now, the game doesn't have enough content to justify its price tag.

Overall, I feel Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an average multiplayer experience. The gameplay is unbalanced, plus many people will be bored of it quickly, thanks to the lack of game modes and small map selection. I only advise you to buy this game on sale if you are a huge Dragon Ball fan.

Verdict: 6.0/10