Most Dragon Ball games put players in the role of mighty heroes like Goku and Vegeta as they reenact the plot of the Dragonball Z anime. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is instead taking a page from asymmetrical horror titles like Dead By Daylight, letting fans experience the nightmarish rampages of the Dragon Ball franchise’s most notorious villains from the perspective of everyday civilians and mere mortal allies. Publisher Bandai Namco and Sonic The Hedgehog handheld developer Dimps revealed Dragon Ball: The Breakers last November, and it has finally launched across all major systems in time for Halloween.
Like with all asymmetrical multiplayer titles, Dragon Ball: The Breakers divides its players into two uneven sides. A small band of Survivors is caught in a Temporal Seam, leaving them stranded in a place where space and time are thrown into chaos. Unfortunately there is also a deadly Raider, one of Dragonball Z’s most terrifying villains, who is slowly growing stronger – and is out to eliminate them before they can escape.
New players start Dragon Ball: The Breakers by customizing their Survivor character and going through a lengthy tutorial mission. After the player is fully set up, they can start an online game or open a practice server from the main hub world. Survivors are picked at random to form a team of eight and are tasked with powering the Super Time Machine in the center of the map to escape and send the Raider back to their own time. This requires locating a Power Key and placing it in a certain location by holding down the Triangle button until a meter fills up.
This causes a mini capsule to descend so the Survivors can flee, but also alerts the Raider to the Survivors’ presence. If the Raider destroys the Super Time Machine’s startup system, players will instead have to activate the Emergency Time Machine. This will ensure their safety, but leave the Raider behind to terrorize the past. Survivor gameplay can be hectic due to the large maps, especially for players who haven’t found the Power Key-detecting radar item yet.
Of course, the player can also defeat the Raider outright by depleting their health, but this is easier said than done. Survivors can collect Transpheres to build Change Power and activate a Dragon Change – taking the form of a legendary Dragonball Z character and battling against the Raider on a more level playing field. Here, gameplay becomes more in line with traditional Dragonball Z games, with players unleashing devastating Ki attacks and martial arts moves against their enemy in a brief aerial battle. However, once the player’s energy is drained, they return to normal – and are quite vulnerable to retaliation from the Raider. The titular Dragon Balls are also scattered around the field. If a Survivor can gather them at a shrine, they can summon the great dragon Shenron to boost their Dragon Change level to the highest tier.
Unfortunately, the Raider can also use the Dragon Balls to wish for more health or a higher power level. The Raider’s role is given randomly to players who have their preference set to it in the pre-match settings. Raiders start each round in a basic form and grow stronger by killing Survivors and building up energy to evolve. When they transform, the Raider gains increasingly powerful new abilities – including some that can destroy entire sections of the map. Flying around and wreaking havoc as a Raider is one of the more enjoyable parts of the game, but getting to play as a Raider in Dragon Ball: The Breakers can be extremely rare.
Dragonball: The Breakers is fun to play in short bursts, but might be somewhat lacking for players looking for a tense experience like Dead By Daylight. Hardcore fans of the franchise may have some fun trying to evade iconic villains like Frieza or obliterate entire sections of the map as Majin Buu, but anyone else should probably look elsewhere for a genuinely chilling asymmetrical survival title.
Dragonball: The Breakers is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. A digital PS4 code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.
