Gundam Breaker 4 Review – Return to Form

Gundam Breaker 4 Review

If you’re a diehard Gundam fan, with shelves sagging with kits and your favorite Gundam tattooed on your bicep: my apologies. I’m not that. I played and enjoyed Gundam Breaker 3 a decade ago, assembled a few models then lost track of the series. So this will not be a deep dive into the lore, spinoffs, and reboots. I will note that the follow-ups to Gundam Breaker 3 — New Gundam Breaker and Gundam Breaker Mobile — were disappointing and failed to move the series forward. Now we have Gundam Breaker 4. Its mere existence surprised fans and happily, it’s a bit of a redemption.

I assume the vast majority of folks reading this are conversant with the Gundam universe. If not, you need to know that it’s one of the OG mecha IPs — if not the very first — spanning back to 1979. It all started with the anime Mobile Suit Gundam. This humble TV series spawned an unimaginable number of games (over 80), anime, and films. Most significantly for the Gundam Breaker series, it created an industry based on model kits called Gunpla, itself a vast and complex world. Gundam Breaker 4 essentially brings collecting and kitbashing the models to life.

Toys to Life (or Games)

Players of FromSoftware’s excellent Armored Core VI might expect a similar experience with Gundam Breaker 4. Sure, they’re both about customizable mecha and the battles take place on relatively small stages. But whereas Armored Core VI was dark, gritty, and reveled in brutal battles, Gundam Breaker 4 is far less solemn. It has a narrative and world, but at its core, it’s about playing with virtual models and seeing how they perform in combat.

The campaign has no character customization (since you never see your character outside the Gundam). You play as a newbie Gundam player dropped into the beta version of a developing virtual reality game, Gunpla Battle Blaze: Beyond Borders. You start with a trainer named Tao and a fellow player named Lin and have the most basic of Mobile Suits to fight with. The game’s suite of tutorial missions and end bosses do a good job of onboarding novices.

In between missions, you go back to your home base HUB to — you guessed it — customize your Gunpla, socialize (including with other players), and get your next mission. Along the way you meet additional characters and the narrative expands to include some rivalries, secrets, and a bit of interpersonal tension. It’s all family-friendly and there isn’t a hint of the existential angst that powered Armored Core VI’s story. It’s pretty well voiced, but mostly there to shuttle you to the next battle.

Pick Apart and Put Together

Imagine you have a nearly infinite number of Gunpla kits at your disposal. You could build the Mobile Suit of your dreams. That’s the heart of Gundam Breaker 4. In the same way that the best Warhammer games feel like you’re playing with tabletop models, Breaker 4 brings kits to life.

You can customize nearly every aspect of your Mobile Suit’s weapons, armor, and components. Of course, the gear you strap on to your mech has a wealth of related buffs, special effect attacks, and Synergies. Additionally, you have melee and sword abilities and weapons for when you tire of long-range mayhem. This time around you can even customize parts asymmetrically. Meaning, your arms can each have different structures.

I’m giving short shift all the stuff you can collect and play with because the most fun I had was unlocking and testing new parts. I guess it might be because building the physical models is also my favorite part of the Gundam universe. In any case, you have to complete missions to unlock new parts. The harder the mission, the better the parts. The better the parts, the harder the missions you can complete. It’s an obvious but enjoyable loop.

The Plains are Plain

While its narrative has a coherent arc, Gundam Breaker 4’s missions consist of relatively small, thematically unrelated stages. They’re disappointingly barren and look dated, maybe to compensate for the ancient Switch’s tech. I get it. In the game’s fiction, they’re in virtual reality. But they could have been much more interesting and detailed. The Gunpla themselves are colorful and elaborate, looking like the plastic models on which they’re based.

The battles themselves are frenetic, engaging, and often challenging, especially when under-leveled or with the wrong gear. The gee-wiz radio chatter is worth listening to for story insights, I guess, but the actual environmental audio is a bit tepid. My biggest disappointment was that the Mobile Suits — unlike the Armored Cores — entirely lack the sense of power and scale that mecha should have.

One of the coolest features of Gundam Breaker 4 is the Diorama, which allows players to stage their lovingly created and painted models in cool scenes. It’s easy to get lost in this mode and forget about the combat and story entirely.

Return to Form

For fans of the franchise, Gundam Breaker 4 is a successful reward for the patient faithful. For casual Gundam players not deeply invested in the series, Gundam Breaker 4 is a surprisingly good introduction to the experience. After a few hours in its virtual battles, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll want to start building a collection of Gunpla. Clear your shelves and enjoy.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***