Puzzle games, like Legends of Solgard, have the merit of being non-committal methods of passing time. They're almost always either great and addictive, or boring and forgettable. Epic Games, known for Fortnite, has released their own puzzle game, Battle Breakers. Let's see how this title holds up in the grand scheme of entertainment.
In a Nutshell
Overall Feeling: That feeling when a middle-aged man tries really hard to be hip and relatable to young teenagers. Unsuccessfully.
Pros:
- Can be played as an idle game
- Lots of rewards, easy to get things
Cons:
- Not much in the way of gameplay or story depth
- Inconsistent art styles
Story and Writing
From the tutorial, there are some sort of monsters from space wreaking havoc on the world and corrupting the minds of heroes. In the tutorial of the game we are introduced to a team of heroes that face off against some sort of alien overlord. At the end of the sequence, the overlord captures half of your team and it is up to the hero you choose as your commander to lead a team of their own to rescue the crystallized heroes. Along the way you cleanse the lands of corruption and free heroes and creatures from the control of the otherworldly beings.
That's about all I can gather. The writing is a bit too edgy for me, and its clear that the writers directly targeted the younger audiences. There are also random exchanges in the battle sequences where your heroes trade off one-liners with the monster you're up against. It's very similar to 1990's action movies in that sense. There's a lot of jokes shoe-horned in as well that miss their mark a bit. These would all be tolerable, but the actual story progression is so slow that it is almost non-existent.
Sound
Battle Breakers at least has proper sound balancing. None of the sounds feel out of place or obnoxiously loud. There is, however, a ton of sounds. The game isn't as loud as one, but it is as chaotic as a Japanese pachinko parlor. Yet, the sounds all make sense. There are so many sounds because essentially each action you do has a sound effect, and the nature of the game allows many things to happen at the same time. Interestingly, the simultaneous sounds don't add onto each other, and it seems that the sounds are attenuated properly.
Gameplay and Mechanics
The game's core mechanic is arguably not a puzzle game, but it does technically fit the bill. Puzzle games require problem solving and planning to finish your objectives, and in that sense, Battle Breakers is a sure fit to that description. However, the image of puzzle games stereotypically involves matching shapes or figuring out a problem in a certain number of moves. This game just barely associates to that.
Battle Breakers has you systematically breaking gems to find an exit to the current room. Under each gem could be an item, a monster, a trap, or an exit. When a monster appears, an RPG system comes into play. Each character has a turn timer, and when it is the character's turn they can attack. A tap would prompt a normal attack from the current character's turn and a swipe would prompt the character's special attack (provided they have enough mana in their reserves.)
There are also reflex mechanics, where each character has a random chance to defend or multiply the effect of their own attack. For example, if a monster decides to attack one of your characters, the character has a chance of reflecting the attack back. The reflex defense differs from character to character. Likewise, the reflex attack can trigger when the character is told to use a normal attack.
Those are the core mechanics and gameplay. Everything around that is essentially an RPG gacha system. The way you get new heroes is through a shop or through a system called scanning. You get scanner clues as you play, and they add up to certain tiers. When you reach a tier, you get a choice of one in three heroes. The shop works similarly, albeit with a different currency and more expensive heroes. There is also another way to get heroes, and that's through the monster pit. You can assign already obtained heroes that you don't want to use into the monster pit to level the building up. Reaching certain levels of the pit rewards you with more heroes to use to your liking.
Speaking of buildings, there are other buildings that can be unlocked as you play. They give several bonuses, such as generating resources or free materials, or increasing the level of your equipment or heroes. There is also the Burny Mine, which is basically your personal dungeon crawl.
There are a few more features, but they are more for quality of life than anything. You can go back and do a more difficult version of a level you've already finished, for example, to get better rewards. There are also quests that allow you to get chest rewards after doing a certain number of them. There are also events that use the battle pass system and keep the game updated with things to do. Finally, you can actually play the game on auto, so if you want to farm and level up your characters, you can do so while you do something else.
Unfortunately, good features don't exactly make up for a shallow base of foundational mechanics. In my opinion, the tap to break and attack mechanic is far too simple to keep my attention for very long, and I think it would bore many potential players. There isn't much in the way of planning anything, as the field is too small to have any complexity. Hero stats are the more vital aspects of the game, and people that were drawn to the game for its puzzle aspect would most likely not find number crunching that enjoyable.
Other Issues
Its mechanics and gameplay are not the only things I'm not happy with from what I saw of the game. The way it was packaged overall is also quite underwhelming. I get that Epic Games wanted to keep the app on their terms, but having the game install as a third party app keeps the support on it limited. What I mean by this is that players that get the app will constantly download something at almost every loading screen. Each time I see a loading screen, it tells me that I am downloading a few megabytes of data, and I always find myself wondering for what reason.
Even inside the game, there are inconsistencies that really bother me. The art style randomly changes after the tutorial. Its almost as if the graphic designers fell on difficult deadlines and rushed to get a replacement artist to do the rest of the story. During the exposition cutscenes, the character graphics and the backgrounds had such strikinly different qualities, that it looked highly unprofessional. Even in the same cutscene, you can see two different styles for two characters standing right next to each other. It definitely made me take the game less seriously, and I lost interest when I saw that.
Final Thoughts
I wouldn't go through the hassle of downloading Battle Breakers.
The game itself is not that bad, but it's also not that good. The gameplay is too simple to be entertaining and the story is too shallow to be interesting to most past their teenage years. There is a lot of content, but not much of it is all that meaningful.
That's a quick look at Battle Breakers. Thanks for reading!