Asymmetrical multiplayer games are a dime a dozen nowadays, but few have managed to touch Behaviour Interactive's Dead by Daylight. Dead by Daylight's formula of pitting original and licensed horror villains against helpless survivors is a winning one, and so it's no surprise that others have taken notice. Other developers have tried their hand at making a Dead by Daylight-style game with varying degrees of success, with the latest to enter the arena being Dragon Ball: The Breakers from Dimps and Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Combining Dragon Ball and Dead by Daylight may seem like a ludicrous idea to many, but it works much better than expected. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is a 1v7 affair, with seven survivors facing off against a single villain, or "raider," as they're called in the game. Dragon Ball: The Breakers' villains roster is a who's-who of famous DBZ baddies, including Frieza, Cell, Majin Buu, and others. The raiders in Dragon Ball: The Breakers are tasked with wiping out all the survivors, while the survivors have to work together to activate a "super time machine" and make their escape.

The survivors in Dragon Ball: The Breakers have to collect keys and activate the super time machine by holding a button in specific areas of the map. This is not unlike activating generators in Dead by Daylight, and the resulting action feels very similar to Behaviour's horror game. The survivors in Dragon Ball: The Breakers are a little more capable of defending themselves than the DBD survivors, though.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers survivors are equipped with a gun that, while not all that useful in fighting off super-powered foes like Cell and Majin Buu, can be used to destroy objects to find items. They have various skills they can use to evade capture, and they can also summon the power of various Dragon Ball heroes to give themselves a boost in combat. Survivors can only transform into these characters for a brief period of time, so they have to coordinate these abilities with their fellow players to get the most out of them and thwart the villain.

If the survivors manage to activate the super time machine, the villain can still destroy it. This is where the survivors have to really work together, as protecting it becomes top priority. If they fail, which seems to happen in almost every match that's not played in a party with friends, then they have to escape from the map using special escape pods. The villain still wins the match, but some survivors can get away if they're fast enough.

The basic concept of Dragon Ball: The Breakers is fun. Playing as the survivors is fine, but playing as the villains is where the game really shines. The game doesn't nerf the villains in any real way and even gives them the ability to destroy entire sections of the map. Picking off the survivors one by one as an immensely powerful Dragon Ball Z villain is a genuinely great time, but there are some serious drawbacks that keep the game from reaching its full potential and will likely prevent it from reaching the same heights as other games in the genre.

The biggest issue in Dragon Ball: The Breakers by far is the matchmaking, which is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes players will be able to get into games within a couple of minutes, but there have been times when we were queued up for half an hour or more. It's also very rare to play as the raider, which is the most fun, and those playing solo will grow tired of having to play as survivors with randoms who either don't know how to play or aren't that great at communicating.

When players are actually in a match, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is mostly fine, with a few major downsides. For one, the game is limited to three maps at launch, which does not provide much in the way of variety, and for two, navigating these maps can sometimes be a headache. The main problem is the camera, which lets players run all the way from one side of the screen to the next before adjusting itself. It can be rather disorienting, especially during the game's more intense moments.

Another big knock against Dragon Ball: The Breakers' core gameplay is with its combat. While it's refreshing to finally have a new Dragon Ball game that isn't yet another in the long line of DBZ fighting games, it would have been nice to have better fighting mechanics. What's here is rather clunky, with it difficult to tell which attacks are landing.

Players will get used to Dragon Ball: The Breakers' clunkiness, but then there's the game's excessive monetization to consider. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is a smorgasbord of video game monetization, combining microtransactions, a battle pass, and gacha mechanics all in one. This would be easier to look past if it was a free-to-play game and not a premium product, but for some reason, Dragon Ball: The Breakers costs $20. This seems like a rather pointless barrier to entry when one would think the goal would be to get as many people into the game as possible to try to sell microtransactions.

Many players will be turned off by Dragon Ball: The Breakers' monetization, but the good news is that there's still a lot they can get in the game without paying a dime. Most of the content players earn comes in the form of cosmetic items that they can use to customize their character. Players also have the opportunity to play as classic Dragon Ball characters Oolong and Bulma if they would rather do that instead.

There's plenty of more content on the way for Dragon Ball: The Breakers. In fact, it's already been teased that Great Ape Vegeta could be coming in the game's second season. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is the kind of game that's rough around the edges at launch but could be improved greatly with updates. A switch to a completely free-to-play monetization model would do wonders for the game, and it seems likely that it could head in that direction, so Dragon Ball fans may want to wait and see what happens.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is available for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One. Game ZXC was provided an Xbox One code for this review.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers