Gundam Breaker 4 review: Breaking and building Gunpla to your heart's content

Today’s review subject is Gundam Breaker 4, which is weird, because like I mentioned in our preview earlier this month, we (North America) didn’t get the other ones. Well, sort of. While Gundam Breaker as a series built up a fanbase while Bandai Namco was still gunshy on many localizations, we did get a kind of spinoff in New Gundam Breaker. Unfortunately that game was a dumpster fire, seemingly shelving the series. Luckily that wasn’t the case, and a new, numbered entry in the series is here and widely available. And it’s great to be back, so to speak.

The nerdiest thing possible, in a good way

Mobile Suit Gundam as a series is wild. We’re talking a history spanning back to the 1970s, which is hard to imagine. A serious story about generational struggles and blatant anti-war messaging, Gundam itself may not have endured without Gunpla, accessible model kits Bandai made for the mech suits in the show. Merchandising may have harshed the vibe, but it’s a major part of Gundam’s enduring legacy. Gunpla is still huge today, and Gundam Breaker is a piece of that aspect of Gundam fandom becoming its own beast and IP.

In Gundam Breaker, Gunpla has become far more than just putting model kits together. Now, your Gunpla kit takes on a sort of avatar role, as you pilot your makeshift mobile suit in a sort of massive, virtual reality game. By yourself or with friends you go out on missions, fighting other mobile suits in realistic combat scenarios. But the hook is when you damage enemy mechs, they can drop Gunpla parts! Using an absolutely mind-shattering creative suite, you can use those parts to customize your Gunpla well beyond what’s reasonable to do in real life. Then you take your new kit on stronger missions, get stronger parts, and repeat that loop more or less until you’re satisfied.

It can’t be understated how awesome the customization aspect of Gundam Breakers is. Each part can not only be selected individually for stats and abilities, but you can alter them visually in an absurd number of ways. Colors down to individual pieces of a piece, finishing, weathering for artificial damage (top level Gunpla sickos do this in real life), decals, purely cosmetic parts and more are all on the table. You can even warp the size and shape of individual pieces to make a Gunpla kit that is truly your own. Or a horrible manifestation of your own twisted sense of humor in a way Street Fighter 6’s cursed character creator couldn't even dream of. Whatever floats your mech.

This latest entry takes customization to a whole new level with the Diorama feature, which was incredibly hard for me to even wrap my head around looking at it. I mean that from an ADHD perspective; there was no way my dang ol' brain could handle that. But just flipping through and seeing the number of options and ways to play with just posing multiple Gunpla kits together and adding in explosions and stuff, I can see the vision. There's a degenerate level of appeal to folks who truly love Gunpla and everything about it, and the amount of thought clearly put into it all is commendable.

There’s gameplay too, sometimes

While making your Gunpla is clearly the main attraction, the combat that gets you new parts and an excuse to show off is no slouch. The vibe here is loosey-goosey, kind of arcadey and button-mashy, but with lots of different properties and combo potential to play with. In fact, if you can keep your combo/hit counter going à la Devil May Cry, your rarity and quality for part drops goes up. So not only is being stylish with your kit designs a big deal, maintaining that sense of style in how you approach combat is just as important. It’s a self-feeding system that’s a blast to participate in, and miles better than the weird, arena-like battles that made New Gundam Breaker a flop.

The combat-custom-combat-custom loop is, naturally, prime for having fun with friends. Gundam Breaker 4 knows this keenly, as even the single-player campaign has you going on missions with buddies. Since the loop is so simple, and combat easy to understand without being too casual, you can lose hours in a lobby just doing the core-level, basic stuff. And to sweeten the deal further, you can actually set your top three Gundam properties as part of your profile badge, the perfect way to kick off an argument with your friends about the purity and craft of Universal Century Gundam versus the flashier, contemporary stylings of the After Colony side. If you know, you know.

The power of anime

Gundam Breaker 4’s biggest drawback is its story. Obviously I wouldn’t walk into a game about action figures and expect the kinds of horrors and human conflicts I’d get from a regular Gundam work. I can just watch Gundam F91 again if I want that. You have to expect something a little more lighthearted and silly here, and everything that comes with that. Gundam Breaker 4 feels like it could be a Saturday morning cartoon show, a breezy anime mostly made to sell toys to kids. It’s like running a fork through air and trying to eat it, although it does have jokes and drama when it wants to. But storytelling is not what you’re here for, unless we’re talking about the emergent storytelling of how you found horns from the Dynasty Warriors Gundam series in the cosmetics, made your Gunpla into a Bull Man, and went on a tear to cement your Musou-referencing Gundam Bull Man’s legacy before getting bored and completely changing it after you got some new parts. That’s the good stuff.

When it comes down to it, Gundam Breaker 4 is all about the bits and pieces. Literally. If you’ve ever put a Gunpla kit together you understand how long it takes, how it feels to put the parts together, and how awesome it is to pose and admire the finished kit. A video game version of that is obviously different, and this game takes full advantage of those differences. When the laws of reality and resource scarcity don’t apply, Gunpla can be something completely different, exciting, and fun in its own ways. Drop some fun combat and multiplayer capacity on top and you have a formidable time sink. You get out what you put in, and there’s an admirable amount of space to let that mean different things to different players, and it all feels rewarding.

Gundam Breaker 4 is available on August 29, 2024 for the PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A PC code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.