#Gundam nt review series
Even with an office grade connection, the game straight up froze on several occasions, and even relatively smoother matches involved me and other players teleporting around the area like a series of jump cuts. This is further exacerbated by the major lag that accompanies every online match. You can fight each other but outside of the 3v3 Skirmish modes, there’s never any incentive to do that. Two teams of three people each are dropped in an arena where they complete objectives and fight neutral grunt enemies. The actual missions are quite repetitive in and of themselves even if you don’t worry about unlocking parts. You could obviously re-run missions over and over again for a chance at unlocking different parts, if you want to go down that route, but either way the process of unlocking parts is never as fun or as intuitive as it should be in a game all about customization. The problem is that if you want your Gundam to look consistent, unlocking the rest of the parts is expensive and requires a ton of the in-game currency, with which the game is incredibly stingy. You uncover Gundam parts during missions, which unlocks them in the Shop menu where you can plop them onto your own Gundam and marvel at the results. So the customization options, for all intents and purposes, are mostly cosmetic. Unlocking and equipping the Deadscythe is something that should feel monumental and awesome, but in New Gundam Breaker it only does slightly more damage and feels exactly like the beam saber you start out with. You can make your Gundam look all kinds of weird, but your core movement and combat abilities don’t change much. It offers a huge array of robots and customization options, but my gameplay experience never differed much regardless of how much I tinkered with things. While the story is all good and fun, the core gameplay loop of New Gundam Breaker revolves around its Gundams, and this is sadly where the game is at its weakest. You can’t really begrudge the simplicity in a narrative where most personal demons are resolved by using small toy robots to punch other toy robots. These characters meet each other early on and then help each other resolve their issues in a rather simple but sweet story. Of course it’s a visual novel so they all immediately love the protagonist and want to be BFFs with them but that’s okay. The girls in New Gundam Breaker all arrive fully formed with their own motivations and desires, and are all really good at what they do. The story is very anime-is-as-anime-does but it has quite a few strong points, not the least of which is an amazing cast of female characters.
#Gundam nt review full
All of this action occurs in a high school for Gunpla builders (which has to be the most anime thing not in in anime) where the heroes fight to end the oppressive rule of the student council which is full of bullies who hate the idea of people having fun with Gunplas. The nameless faceless protagonist and their friends are all extremely good and building Gunpla and operate them in virtual simulations like actual Mobile Suit pilots.
The game places you in the shoes of a Gunpla Builder (Gunpla refers to the real-life toys that allow fans of the series to build their own Gundams from scratch with small parts and paint them). Much to my surprise, New Gundam Breaker actually manages to circumvent this issue and have a pretty serviceable, somewhat entertaining story. This is why sometimes you end up with Setsuna fighting Aznable in an arena that neither of them have any reason to be inside.
The main problem with the Gundam games so far have always been stories, because most of them try to incorporate Mobile Suits from different entries in the series within the same narrative, resulting in stories that can only be described as jumbled messes. Despite offering an intermittently entertaining story and a very robust customization system, New Gundam Breaker fails at crafting an engaging game out of its many disparate elements. New Gundam Breaker, however, is far from great. The Gundam games are quite saturated - more so than you think - and have had an impressive string of successes lately. If a JRPG is a nerdy stat spreadsheet draped over evocative fantasy settings, mecha games are those same spreadsheets applied to a game of cold, hard maths, and New Gundam Breaker is exactly that kind of game.īehind the anime veneer and the visual novel style narrative, New Gundam Breaker is as traditional as mech games can get, just with the added style that comes with the Gundam license. The whole point is to build an awesome robot, equip it with the best parts for the way you want it to function, then take it to battle and punch other awesome robots with it. The best part of mech games is always in the min-maxing they eventually come down to.