Gundam Breaker 3 is an action game based on the Gundam franchise for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4. The key gameplay element here is that you build your own Gunpla. You participate in Gunpla battles and by defeating enemies, you gain more parts. You can then equip these parts onto your Gunpla and make it stronger. Each part has a level attached to it, you can merge parts together to increase its level and make it stronger. Parts also come with specific abilities which may influence your play style. Parts include arms, legs, weapons, backpack, torso, head and shields. This means your Gunpla is probably a mishmash of parts but still looks pretty cool no matter what you have.
Your Gunpla has two main attacks mapped to two face buttons, a jump/boost and the last face button is mapped to an ability of your choosing (which you can pick from eight on the fly using the D-pad). You can block and also use a combination of the shoulder button and a face button for one of four special abilities, which you pick and equip beforehand. The range of special abilities depends upon the part you have picked, since each type of part carries a different special ability.
The game is like a cross between Monster Hunter and Dynasty Warriors. Battles are fast paced and tons of fun in the beginning. Levels take around 15 to 30 minutes long. Within each level are smaller areas separated by loading screens. Levels will pit you against numerous opponents at once and battles get very chaotic. Unlike Extreme Vs Force, the lack of two shoulder triggers on the Vita does not impact on the controls and it still feels very good and intuitive to use.
The biggest problem is the camera though since while you can lock-on, the game has a tendency to auto-lock onto the enemy in front of you which could be the furthest opponent away, instead of the closer one to your side. Changing targets to the one you want is confusing when you have 5-10 in your view at once. Furthermore, if you don't use the lock-on feature (which you can toggle on/off awkwardly using the touchscreen), then your attacks will probably miss and the opponent will go offscreen.
There are various battle modes such as Battle Royale (defeating enemies with Ace teams arriving at certain points), Core Assault (player defends own core while attacking the enemy's), Monolith Demolition (destroying a monolith) and Team Deathmatch (one round between two teams). All of them effectively boil down to defeating all the enemy Gunpla, and by chapter 3, the game gets repetitive, formulaic and quite bland. This is because by this point, you would have seen all the maps and played all the modes. Each level takes too long to complete with too many waves of high HP opponents that you will just smash through. There are 50 story levels but it just feels really tedious and a huge chore to slug through.
There are five difficulties that you can change before commencing a level. At the start of the game, there is Casual, Standard and Hardcore. Casual and Standard are extremely easy even right off the bat but will gradually rise in challenge (especially in boss battles). The rise in challenge is mostly due to uneven balance as you'll have enemies who die in three hits but then you'll encounter enemies who'll die in 100 hits in the same level. Chapter bosses can do hefty damage while having a huge HP bar and multiple phases. Your gear will seriously make or break you, and also the type of abilities you bring into the level will make a huge difference.
Once you finish the story mode, you unlock Extreme and if you the beat the story on extreme, you unlock Newtype, which is very difficult unless you have great parts. On Extreme and Newtype, enemies get a staggering amount of HP becoming a huge pain to defeat. Furthermore, they love to gang up on you and not your allies, meaning you'll be stunlocked to oblivion and back, and before you know it, you lose 800k+ HP and on the brink of death, in the space of half a second before you can even shoot.
Even worse on the higher difficulties is that there are more waves of sub-bosses and each wave has more enemies. This means framerate is going to tank on the Vita. It becomes impossible to know what is going on when the framerate drops to 2 frames per second, making an already tedious game even more tedious. While the performance on the Vita is solid for the most part, once a lot of Gunpla is onscreen and with beam effects flying everywhere, the framerate will chug and there'll be input lag.
The story follows you, the player, as you move to an area near the Ayato Shopping Street, which is in danger of being shut down and taken over by a large corporation. You meet Misa, who is the daughter of the owner of a hobby store. They both play Gunpla Battle, and they end up joining together as a team to participate in the tournaments and win in the hopes of reviving the Shopping Street, which has seen dwindling customers day to day.
The story is told in a visual novel style with spoken dialogue. There is no way to speed up dialogue as it does not come up as text boxes, it's more like a static cutscene. You can skip any cutscene though. There are a total of five chapters for the story and it's somewhat uninspiring and predictable. The ending was a bit out of whack and filled with cliches such as help coming from all the characters they have met on their journey. Of note is that there is a huge Vita update of around 2.2GB, adding two new modes, Bounty Hunter (fighting against pre-loaded custom models offline) and Challenge (fighting against waves of enemies), as well as new Gunpla and parts.
Overall, Gundam Breaker 3 is a pretty fun game. However, the combat does get repetitive, especially with its tendency to pit waves upon waves of enemies against you in each level, taking far too long to complete (it is easier to stomach if it takes 10-15 minutes to complete a level, not 25-30 minutes). The collection of parts, merging and creating the best Gunpla is addictive and rewarding.
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