Review for New Gundam Breaker. Game for PC and PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 21/06/2018 The version for PC came out on 24/09/2018 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 22/06/2018
New Gundam Breaker it might, at first glance, seem like a Japanese mecha game like there are many, enriched by the almost forty-year-old Gundam brand, which is no small feat that many other titles were missing, such as the very dignified Project Nimbus: Code Mirai. New Gundam Breaker, on the other hand, is NOT a Japanese mecha game, but rather a game on Japanese mecha models!
In fact, the absolute protagonists of New Gundam Breaker are the Gunpla, short for “Gundam plastic Model”, that is those very detailed combinable models that are so popular in the land of the Rising Sun and that conquer more and more people even here. The Gunplas allow you to collect every possible and imaginable mobile suit seen, played or even just hinted at in the endless production of anime, manga, novels and videogames under the Gundam brand.
The outlay to build a noteworthy Gunpla collection is truly remarkable, and in this New Gundam Breaker it turns out to be a real treat for fans. In the game, in fact, we will be able to freely assemble any Gunpla type that we can think of, customize it and color it properly, and then use it in battle. But let's go step by step.
New Gundam Breaker puts us in the shoes of a high school student, who has recently moved with his family to a new city and is struggling with his inclusion in the new school, the prestigious Gunbre High School, a sort of academy where you learn the noble art of building and collecting Gunpla (!) and then, of course, make them fight each other.
This part of the game, which then acts as a single player campaign, presents itself to us as a sort of visual novel, where we will be called to interact with the various students and school activities through well-made semi-animated screens and endless dialogues in Japanese, to which fortunately they cope with excellent Spanish text translations. If the story already seemed rather rambling from the start, the plot unfolds in the most stereotypical and banal way possible. We will find ourselves having to fight various bullies and the perfidious Student Council which, according to what is seen in anime and manga, in Japan is always made up of crazy and / or megalomaniacs of all kinds.
All this to give a minimum of sense to what, together with the construction phase, should be the real fulcrum of New Gundam Breaker, or the combat between Gunpla.
In this phase, which will involve 99% of a team clash, three against three, we will directly pilot our model in a battle with a very musou taste, since our three challengers are often supported by hordes of expendable “minions”. Why they do and we don't, we don't know.
During these clashes, quite frenetic to tell the truth, we will have to literally demolish our opponents, and then steal the components left on the field. Each component, obviously divided into various levels of value and rarity, not only has a mere aesthetic function, but can give our robot certain abilities, types of attack or boost in various characteristics. Our "spoils of war" as well as used in the "laboratory" section to build our definitive Gunpla, can also be equipped on the fly, during combat, in order to immediately exploit the peculiar ability given by a certain piece.
This action part, in addition to the clash with the opposing team, also includes random "sub missions", which appear on the screen and should encourage the player to explore the environments and "loot" as many components as possible. In reality, however, they are practically only a nuisance, since they repeat the usual two or three objectives endlessly.
Visually this action part does not look bad, with the Gunpla well defined and discreetly animated. Too bad that the controls are quite woody (the lock on system is a nightmare) and, above all, that the entire action part suffers from tremendous drops in frame rate, lag in commands and inaccurate collisions. All these bugs still persist, despite the substantial patch released at D1 which, on paper, should have fixed things.
Each mission, except the first, will always be three against three. If this is an incentive to play online, it proves to be a burden to those who did not want / could use multiplayer. In single player our mates will be piloted by AI, which isn't terrible, but it's not state of the art either. Furthermore, any game tactics are totally lacking in acronyms. You aim the camera and press keys practically at random, so something always happens.
Luckily (although in normal cases it's not usually lucky) the campaign is very short and finishing it gives us a way to grab many components to use in the real fun part of the game, that is the phase of construction of the models. A little too little, however, to raise the title.
New Gundam Breaker was a real disappointment. Wanting to overlook the bizarre and clearly ultra stereotyped plot, the action component, regardless of whether online or in single player, is chilling. The controls are so woody that it almost immediately boils down to boorish button smashing hoping to hit the right guy. You don't even remotely get to epic duels as seen in the various sagas of the brand! Frame rate drops on Playstation 4 are embarrassing, even after the patch. As already mentioned, the only really successful part is that of assembling and customizing the Gunpla. But that's just too little to save this New Gundam Breaker.
► New Gundam Breaker is a Sliding-Shooter-type Beat 'em up game published by Bandai Namco for PC and PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 21/06/2018 The version for PC came out on 24/09/2018 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 22/06/2018
