Last week, Bandai Namco announced Dragon Ball: The Breakers, a very interesting-sounding take on the asymmetrical survival genre. Now, the company has a new trailer to announce its closed beta dates. But more importantly, it’s an explanation of the gameplay loop that’s about 10 minutes long.
New details include the actual mechanics for survivors and raiders alike. For the survivors, co-op is definitely an important factor. The escape mechanism involves a lot of scouring the playable map for keys that speed up the summoning of the time machine needed to escape. Even after summoning the time machine, it takes time to startup. The raider can also destroy it during this time.
Fortunately, the survivors are not completely defenceless. One of the skills available to them involves being able to channel the power of stronger, named fighters in the Dragon Ball universe. This will also allow them to partially transform in to said fighter. But because they will only be able to channel a part of their power, survivors will only be able to slow down the raider, or distract them from the time machine’s summoning.
Unless the survivors can collect all seven Dragon Balls scattered around. This will allow one survivor to choose to either power up everyone’s transformation, or to perfect their own transformation. This allows them to fully assume the power – and look – of a named character. And the trailer shows this as being the only way for a survivor to fight toe to toe with a raider.
On the flip side, the raider can also collect the Dragon Balls to immediately advance a stage of their evolution. Their evolution is also not limited to killing survivors, as killing NPC civilians can also feed their evolution gauge. And whenever a raider evolves, the playable map is effectively shrunk, making it easier to find and wipe out the survivors.
Overall, Dragon Ball: The Breakers sounds like a blast for those who are into either the franchise’s universe, or the asymmetrical survival genre. But it still doesn’t have a release date beyond the year-long 2022 window.
(Source: Bandai Namco / YouTube)
