MeinMMO author Lena had the opportunity to fight for survival in the closed beta of the survival multiplayer Dragon Ball: The Breakers for several hours. What started as frustration and boredom eventually turned into fun. In this article, you’ll find out if Dragon Ball: The Breakers is worth your time.
Filled with a heavy dose of nostalgia and bouncing in my chair, I eagerly awaited my closed beta key and the corresponding 4-hour time window during which I could finally test Dragon Ball: The Breakers.
What kind of game is this? Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an asymmetric survival multiplayer that strongly resembles games like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th: The Game.
One player takes on the role of the Raider, while 7 others fight for survival.
Both parties have different goals during a match:
- The Survivors: Escape from and/or defeat the Raider.
- The Raider: Kill all Survivors and prevent their escape.
Other features of the game:
- Simple character creation for male and female survivors.
- In-game shop with cosmetics, accessories, emoticons… (available for purchase via premium currency or regular currency).
- “Spirit Extractors” as Gacha mechanics.
- Gacha means that you need to invest in-game currency or often real money to receive random heroes. It’s still unknown if you can spend money in Dragon Ball: The Breakers.
- Possible strengthening of Survivor skills through training.
- Survivors can disguise themselves as objects and use other gadgets to escape from the Raider.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers functions completely differently from its predecessors Budokai Tenkaichi 3 or Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, which are more considered fighting games.
Nonetheless, The Breakers is set in the Xenoverse universe, and you can transfer your save from Xenoverse 2 to the cooperative survival game.
What exactly will be transferred, I cannot tell you yet, but I suspect that your character from Xenoverse 2 will act as a Survivor in The Breakers – so you might not have to create a new character.
I have hardly any experience with asymmetric survival games that put a player instead of an NPC against you. Therefore, Dragon Ball: The Breakers was a real new experience for me.
My entrance into the game – Preparing for the massacre
When I started the beta of Dragon Ball: The Breakers, all settings related to graphics, controls, and sound overwhelmed me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t select a German voiceover – I secretly hoped for the classic RTL-2 voice: Tommy Morgenstern as Son Goku. Well, had to settle for the original broadcast, that is, Japanese with German subtitles.
Then came the character creation menu, which was kept very simple. However, there was still plenty of choice among the characteristically Dragon Ball hairstyles and eyes. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to choose between two outfits: half-naked or sporty dressed.
Although I usually spend what feels like hours on character creation, this time I finished in about 4 minutes. This was mainly because I set a limit for myself; you couldn’t stay in the beta forever, only 4 hours per time slot.
Then the game threw me into a tutorial window that I had at least partially… skimmed through. That would come back to haunt me later. After that, I found my character on a small map with various people and buildings:
- Familiar faces like Trunks, Bulma, and the pig Oolong.
- The Room of Spirit and Time (training for my characters’ skills).
- The in-game shop.
- A hairdresser (allows you to completely rework your character).
- A mailbox.
- The Spirit Extractor to obtain new characters via Gacha mechanics.
What do you need new and other characters for, besides your Survivor? Just to give you a rough idea: You can increase your Dragon Transformation level using a so-called transformation power and borrow the appearance and skills of a well-known character from Dragon Ball. This allows you to fight more effectively and move better because you can fly.
After carefully inspecting the manageable map and perhaps spending a minute or two in the Gacha system, I plunged into battle.
Catastrophic start – “What am I even doing here?”
In my first game, I played a Survivor. Then, for about three games, I didn’t realize that I could set my preference to Raider. Nonetheless, I happily waved to my teammates in the lobby, which was possible through the available gestures. I didn’t know what horror awaited me in “Highland River” (the map name).
I started with two other players in a deserted environment. Desperately, I followed one of them because I had no idea what exactly to do. He had probably played several games and quickly took off. “Co-op probably isn’t encouraged after all,” I thought to myself and tried to manage alone.
- Relatively quickly, I discovered that I could shoot with a weapon to destroy certain objects. A few crates were opened before I encountered a civilian in need of help. You just had to hold down a button to rescue the arms. As a thank you, she dropped transformation power.
- Then I found a radar with which I could have located a valuable key, but the unheeded tutorial came back to bite me: I had no idea how to use the radar. In general, I still did not really know what my task as a Survivor was, other than fleeing.
- Shortly thereafter, I was found by Cell, the Raider, and defeated with just a few blows. I survived for less than 2 minutes. That was really bitter.
Do you think my teammates came to my rescue? Oh, please. The other players actually have 60 seconds to revive their buddies and bring them back into the game.
A kind soul did want to help me single-handedly, but unfortunately Cell was still nearby and easily took him down.
Looking back, I realized that this is a really unfair advantage for the Raider: He waits near a corpse, hoping that a Survivor comes to revive the corpse. In the subsequent rounds, there were also some Raiders who shamelessly exploited this disadvantage, almost exterminating the entire group of Survivors.
The Aha moment: “Oh, so that’s how you play!”
After my head was properly washed in the first round, I decided to read the tutorial and play more rounds until I slowly figured out how the game actually works and what the purpose of the Survivors is.
There are a total of 3 phases:
- Phase one, which I affectionately call, “Please Cell, don’t discover and kill me while I collect important power keys”
- The defense phase
- The escape phase, if the defense phase fails.
In phase one, I frantically wandered around with strangers to collect helpful items, the 7 Dragon Balls, the so-called “Super Time Machine power keys” and place them in their rightful locations.
Because the entire map has areas labeled A to E in the alphabet. Thus, a total of 5 areas each need a power key to charge up a “Start System device” that could defeat Cell.
If you run quickly from A to E and place all the keys, phase two begins. This was by far the most stressful part for me. All players usually gather in the special area “Z” to speed up the charging of the Start System device.
Of course, Cell didn’t take this lightly, as it was his job in this phase to destroy the device and the Survivors.Usually, a chaotic fight broke out in this phase among all who had survived so far.
The more games I played, the better I got at it and could even come up with a plan for phase two.
Living as a vase is nice. 
The crates in the game. 
Radars are very useful items. 
My first placed power key! 
The chaos in the special area “Z”.
This is how I prepared for the battle against Cell in the special area: Initially, I gathered a lot of transformation power to raise my “Dragon transformation level” and thus be allowed to borrow the powers of super warriors.
- The type of Dragon transformation depends on the level you first achieved through transformation power. The higher the level, the stronger you become.
- The appearance and skill of the transformation depend on the characters you have equipped before. Each hero is ranked 1, 2, or 3. Thus, if you reach level 2, you borrow the skills and appearance of the character ranked 2.
- If you actually play cooperatively with others, you can also try to find the 7 Dragon Balls together and place them in their intended device. After that, you can summon the dragon Shenron, who either allows you to reach Dragon transformation level 4 or increases the level of all team members.
- Dragon transformation level 4 is power-wise equivalent to the Raider’s maximum form.
Unfortunately, I personally never got to experience placing 7 Dragon Balls on the altar because everyone in the beta was doing their own thing. It’s probably much easier to achieve in a fixed group with agreements – especially if someone has a Dragon Ball radar that shows a survivor where the valuable orbs are hiding.
If you were strong enough, you could defeat Cell just through pure fighting and emerge victorious: No keys or time machines needed.
What then is the 3rd phase for? The escape phase begins when Cell has destroyed the Start System device. In each area, there are then signal lights that allow survivors to summon a single escape time machine. This enables all survivors to escape at the last moment, as long as Cell does not kill them first.
What is it like to play as the Raider?
While I know Cell’s sequence and skills, unfortunately, I never had the chance to play as the Raider. After about 3 matches, I did change my wish in the group search to “Raider”, but I still always ended up as a Survivor. Maybe I was just unlucky – I don’t know.
There is an indicator at the bottom left of the screen showing “Priority” and a number before it. The more often I became a Survivor when I wanted to play as a Raider, the higher the number went. When the beta time ended, I had played about 11 games and the priority was at 8. Unfortunately, I don’t know when one is guaranteed to play as a Raider.
What else does the Raider do and what can he do? As Cell, you must find and eliminate as many Survivors as possible. This makes you stronger and allows you to achieve new forms (a maximum of 4). Once the Raider reaches a new form, he gets an attack that destroys an entire area. Additionally, Cell has the ability to detect nearby Survivors.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers is completely Dragon Ball
Whether it’s the small sound effects when you teleport or the characters in the typical Dragon Ball style, everything gave me a tiny nostalgia hiccup.
Even the circular houses in the city area or the spaceship that resembled the Namek saga with Freeza made my fan heart race. I was constantly exclaiming: “Aww, this is just like in the anime back then!”
The forms that the Raider Cell could achieve were also perfectly modeled based on the anime. He started as a disgusting little larva and could grow into a perfect form by consuming humans. I think this is precisely why Cell is perfect as a villain.
From images, we have already seen Boo and Freeza as additional Raiders. They also fit perfectly into the survival game. Both villains also had several forms in the anime until they reached their full power.
As Survivors, we only had the choice between our character and the pig Oolong in the beta. However, I’m almost certain that iconic figures like Bulma, Chichi, or the Ox King could follow as playable heroes.
I am afraid of the Gacha aspect
Maybe my fear is unfounded, but the mere inclusion of Gacha in Dragon Ball: The Breakers surprised and somewhat unsettled me… Now the question arises: Is the game coming out for free and is financed through (unfair) Gacha, or will it be paid and feature fair, affordable Gacha?
It would be a shame to destroy a game with such great potential through such a system. I sincerely hope that the Gacha aspect offers only minimal bonuses and does not become decisive for gameplay. In the closed beta, I pulled 6 times for heroes from the Dragon Ball universe: this resulted in 2x 4-star heroes and 4x 3-star heroes.
These characters have not only different rarities but also possess varying attack strengths and outfits that you can use during Dragon transformation. The rarer a hero is, the more useful their attack seems to be.
You need 15,000 Zeni or 150 TP tokens to pull once from the banner. Depending on how well you play in a match, you earn a corresponding amount of Zeni. For instance, you can earn about 4,500 Zeni if you complete a game perfectly. TP tokens are exclusively obtained through level-ups of your character, and you only get 3 at a time.
Standard interface of the Gacha system. 
The chances of pulling different heroes. 
I had luck and pulled Son Goku – the main character of the anime.
What I noticed negatively:
- The controls are somewhat cumbersome and take some getting used to.
- Frequent disconnects to the host (the Raider). The game then ends immediately, and the Survivors win.
- The camera is too close to your character. This restricts your field of view somewhat.
- Survivors take too long to revive companions (about 20 seconds).
- The Start System device takes too long to charge (about 2 minutes but can take longer, depending on how many keys have been placed beforehand and how many Survivors are helping).
Some negative points might stem from the fact that I didn’t have fixed teammates and was with strangers in the lobby. We couldn’t properly coordinate and strategize against the Raider.
Conclusion after the closed beta: Is it worth your time?
Definitely! Once you get the hang of different approaches, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is incredibly fun despite its flaws. Initially, I was really frustrated about dying so quickly and just not getting into the game. I almost wanted to quit and sighed that I had no more motivation, but I wanted to persevere to give you an impression, and because I simply love Dragon Ball.
Then suddenly it went click and I somehow got the hang of it. Each round flew by quickly. Every time we won, my smile grew wider. You could sometimes sense how some of the other beta testers were also slowly understanding how the game works.
I believe that with a cool team or people who know how survival co-op works, it can be even more fun.
You should definitely give it a try if you like survival games and/or Dragon Ball and have the opportunity.
Lena
Freelance author at MeinMMO
What do you think? Will you take a peek into Dragon Ball: The Breakers, or is that not your cup of tea? Feel free to share in the comments.
