Gundam Breaker 4: My thoughts
So first thing I should say is I am happy we got a “good” Breaker game in the West. I put good in quotes mainly cause overall its a good game. The little problems I have with it I guess might be cause I am expecting more, to used to the older games, or not in with the new stuff they introduced. There are a lot of suits in this game and I am very happy for them. I can make some of my best creations so far. My main problem is two fold. First Burst Action attacks don’t have a good fell to them, also OP parts are not included in the attacks or they don’t look like it. Second the EX rework. Some of the greatest things with this game is having 2 arms to pick between now and splitting the weapons up now, granted I wish they still had heavy and weak attacks for melee instead of each button having their own weapon.
Lets dive into what the game does right. First off the game has good pacing. It makes you feel like you are growing as you play. Granted since I did the preorder for the Ultimate Edition I had some extra parts to pick from and could be more than a base Gundam, Zaku II, or GM at the start. The only real difference I can think of from the start of this game than 3 is how you can not upgrade your parts until after a certain chapter. I am kinda ok with it, but at the same time the way that whole thing works is a bit of a mess now, I will get into that later.
Next you have really how the game doesn’t hold your hand and lets you make what you want. It has an actual story, I have not watched it all yet but I finished the game. The characters I did listen to during missions didn’t hold me like the ones in 2 or 3, even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Now lets jump into the part I don’t so much care for. The abilities. They took some build it features from older games it feels like and put them down as abilities and made so many of them its not even funny now. Each part has random abilities assigned to it. What this does it makes you have to collect everything instead of hunting for parts who would have a base type of abilities based on the Mobile Suit it was. For Example Wing Zero would have long rifle, saber, reaction speed, and booster abilities on it. Now you can get a Wing Zero part with Bazooka, Axe, and Movement Speed: Hover, this last one is just an example I haven’t seen Hover as a movement speed boost yet. If this was like this in the older games I didn’t realize it and I apologize. I just don’t like all of the randomness to the abilities there is no real reason to have all of the extra abilities to this, then have the same thing but generic as well. Another example is you have Long Range Weapon Capacity: Gauge Recovery Speed, then you have Long Range Weapon Capacity: Right Long Right Gauge Recovery Speed. This gives you a better speed recovery then the base generic one. It also just gives you more than what you need and has more RNG to the rolls and makes you hope you get what you need. I can go on about this but I will not do that as it makes me sound like I am whining.
The game has Burst Actions still in the game but they fell so much weaker. In 1-3 you felt like you were doing an ultimate move to finish off a group of grunts or a final attack on a boss. Now it just feels like a normal attack. I don’t know if that is because it has abilities to boost it or what. But they also made it so Builder Parts, the extra OP parts you can equip to boost damage or make the suit look cooler, do not help in the attack. For Example I tend to play as a Heavy Arms style suit. I put a bunch of missiles, rockets, hard ammo cannons, and gatling guns onto my suit. Then I fire the Burst Action and it normally fires off all of the weapons I have like that, minus Rail Guns those are with Freedom and Strike Freedom Burst Actions. But in this game it only fires off what looks to be your main OP parts from the suit, and your main weapons. This to me isn’t cool but I can deal with it and just hope some new custom parts from other battlelogs or build series are released in the future or the game is patched to increase some of the specials damage and or radiuses of some of them.
The last big complaint is that they made the levels so short and Master Grade Suits don’t seem to have much of a benefit to using them. I haven’t noticed it yet but I did make the move over and started to replace all of my parts to Master Grade. The Levels are soooooo short you can burn through them so quickly mainly cause you don’t move from area to area like older games. It acts like the mobile game and just teleports you as you defeat the enemies of the are. This is a big worry I had about the game when it first was shown off. I miss the days of exploring the levels or getting stuck in an area of respawning enemies cause you were not fast enough. It made the game feel like a dungeon crawler kind of a game. The older games made you think of strategies to finish the levels. Now I legitly can just use my 83 nukes to beat a level cause I can get my weapon gauges so high and just nuke the field. I guess that was two complaints lol but they are just some of my old man problems. I understand why they would want to do this but I also hoped for more of an evolution to the game compared to the older games, this feels like a downgrade to me.
In all I really enjoy the game it is so much better than New Breaker. I can’t even make it that far into the game cause it just feels so bad. I did play a bit of Mobile Breaker but I was not able to keep playing it cause I switched phones right after launch and there was no way to transfer my save. This game has the suits, action, and ability to play with my friends even with it only being 3 person parties instead of 4. I am ok with all of this. I only hope that the updates to come help take out the redundant abilities in the game and boost the damage/area of effect of the Burst Actions, oh and add cross play this could be a thing in all newer games no question asked. This game can live on for a long time like how it seems Bandai is trying to do with other games, I am looking at you Xenoverse 2. I would say look for the game on sale if you are still up in the air about getting it but if you want it now, I do suggest looking at the prices compared to buying just the game without the season pass bundled with it and pick what fits you.