Dragon Ball: The Breakers is like Dead by Daylight with even more destruction

News
By published

Oolong versus Cell goes about how you'd expect

Dragon Ball: The Breakers
(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an unlikely new direction for Dragon Ball games, but also a promising one.

The newly revealed title from Bandai Namco looks to be a Dead by Daylight-inspired asymmetric online multiplayer game which locks a group of seven survivors in a struggle to escape from a lone raider. Potential survivors include familiar characters such as Bulma and long-suffering pig-man Oolong, while the raiders' ranks are composed of Frieza, Cell, and Majin Buu (at least to start).

We don't typically think of Dragon Ball as a horror series, but Dragon Ball: The Breakers seems to embrace just how terrifying it would feel for a regular human (or pig person) who is trying to survive in a city under siege by an unknowably powerful entity. Since each match takes place in a "temporal seam" separate from the main timeline, there won't be any help from Goku and the gang; the survivors' only hope is to find a means of escape.

Meanwhile, playing as a raider lets you enjoy the villains' fantastic power without being immediately counterbalanced by the Z Fighters' ever-rising power level. Destroy whole portions of the map to give survivors less room to hide, track them with your unique abilities, and catch them one by one to evolve into a more perfect form.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is headed to PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2022, and PC players will have the first chance to try it out with a closed beta test "coming soon."

Meanwhile, it looks like the Dead by Daylight studio may have a new AAA project in the works for Xbox. 

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.