Battle Breakers

Remember getting together as kids and playing a game together, but everyone just sort of made the rules up as you went along? That's probably the best way to describe trying to play the free-to-play strategic RPG (role-playing game) Battle Breakers. The basics seem simple enough, with players collecting heroes that have different roles and elemental alignments, with some being stronger or weaker against others. You then put together a small team to take into a few rounds of battle, earn a few goodies, and do the cycle all over again. Sounds good on paper, right? The problems start to arise when everything is put into action.

Battle Breakers is a lot more complicated than it really needs to be. You try to find the exit to each battle by breaking crystals in a hex-based map. This opens up more crystals that might be empty, uncover the exit, reveal a treasure, or launch an enemy attack. Also, each time you break a crystal, the battleground's primary color changes to match an element, giving those attacks an advantage. Enemies might attack all at once and maybe you can try to block, but then again maybe not. It's a convoluted mess, which it seems even the developers realized because the game almost plays itself, even without using the "Auto Play" option. It feels like the game says "You're doing it all wrong" before snatching it out of your hands and taking over. It's a shame too, because the game looks great and you can even see the kernel of real potential in it. Unfortunately, it just throws everything on the wall to see what sticks … and nothing quite does.