New Gundam Breaker

I went into New Gundam Breaker genuinely curious about the one thing it promised to do well: let you kit-bash mech parts together in real time and fight with the results. That part, in isolation, still holds up. The inner frame system ties your build to a role, pushing you toward melee, ranged, or hybrid setups, and picking up parts from downed enemies mid-match to slot into your suit on the fly is a genuinely clever loop. Individual parts come with their own EX skills, and the sheer catalogue of Gunpla represented means devoted fans of the franchise will find plenty of models to obsess over. If customisation were the whole game, this would be an easier recommendation. The problem is that it isn't. The core combat loop was rebuilt from scratch by a new team using Unreal Engine 4, and almost every change made things worse compared to what came before. Matches drop you into wide arenas in a 3-versus-3 format where both sides chase a rotating list of timed sub-quests rather than fighting each other directly. You open crates, kill quota enemies, complete fetch tasks, and only after enough of those tasks are done does the main objective appear. It strips out the direct head-to-head tension and replaces it with busywork. EX skills, which are the flashy moves tied to your equipped parts, start locked at the beginning of every mission and only unlock as you grind through in-match level-up tiers, meaning you spend the early minutes of every fight under-powered regardless of how much time you put into your build beforehand. Movement feels sluggish throughout, jumping and dashing have noticeable input lag, and the lock-on system struggles badly around large targets. The story framing all of this is a high-school-set visual novel where the player character navigates relationships with several female classmates while occasionally fighting battles. The romance mechanics feel tacked on and, critically, they crowd out screen time that could have gone to anything Gunpla-related. The narrative splits into different character routes but the actual battle missions remain largely identical regardless of which route you pick. Most players, including enthusiastic Gundam fans, report skipping the dialogue almost immediately. Technical performance compounds the frustration: frame rate drops noticeably when the arena fills with units, the mini-map is nearly useless during busy fights, and the UI has longstanding issues with resolution scaling that leave menu text clipped at screen edges. The honest angle here: the game was released in a rough state and received a series of patches after a severe community backlash. The Steam version was actually delayed from the PS4 launch specifically because the original build was so broken, so what PC players got was at least somewhat repaired. Even post-patch, though, the underlying design decisions, the quest-point structure, the locked EX skills, the slow combat pacing, were never overhauled. Famitsu scored it well below every other entry in the franchise. Gundam Breaker 4, released in 2024, effectively walked back every major change this entry made, which tells you everything about how the series itself regards this chapter. If you have no history with the Breaker games and simply want to spend time assembling Gunpla and watching your custom build stomp around a battlefield, there is a shallow but functional experience here at a low enough price point. If you played Gundam Breaker 3 and are expecting something comparable, lower your expectations considerably. Alex, Scout Team