Gundam Breaker 4 is the best playable love letter I've ever seen

To say I played a lot of Gundam Breaker 3 is an understatement so big it would dwarf a real life mobile suit. In fact, when 2024 rolls around and Playstation does its yearly wrap up I promise you it's just going to be GB3 stats. I love it. Take a bunch of Gundam kit parts, mash them together, hand it a weapon and smash your way through waves of enemies. It's perfect.

I got both worried AND excited when I found out Gundam Breaker 4 was going to be a thing though. On one hand, I was really happy that Bandai hadn't dropped the Gundam Breaker series after they shut down their incredibly wonderful Gundam Breakers Mobile game. But I was also worried because I had played New Gundam Breaker, the original follow up to Gundam Breakers 3 and...my god that game sucked.

So when I noticed the next Gundam Breaker was called Gundam Breaker 4 and not something like Gundam Breaker 5 or New Gundam Breaker 2 I was excited. It looked like they were pulling what Coca-cola did with New Coke and just scrap the New recipe.

Now that I've played it though, I'm happy to say that I absolutely love it. It has all that I was hoping it had with few exception and more. But before I get to what I love, let me get the bad stuff out of the way.

The Bad

Not a lot, TBH. The music isn't great but luckily Playstation lets you swap out a soundtrack with your own soundtrack and this game is absolutely wonderful to play while a playlist of cursed mashups plays in the background.

Secondly, unlike Gundam Breaker 3, the fourth Gundam Breaker does not let you port over stuff from a saved file from the previous games. I'll be completely honest, I worked my ass off last month to try and make sure I had some cool stuff to bring over into 4 only to discover that it was their last stop. But, honestly, it gives me more stuff to unlock if I'm not flooding my inventory right out the gate so it's not a bad complaint.

The third one though is the closest to an actual big complaint. Some attacks just don't hit as hard. Close up combat is still great and they actually did make missiles feel more powerful, but some of the things that used to be able to juggle opponents with multiple hits and just feel incredibly powerful are gone. The Atomic Bazooka still has a wonderfully powerful screen filling explosion but now it just hits once instead of sending all the enemies up in the air for a massive multi-hit combo. Likewise, the abilities that cause you to grow light wings and fly over the enemies have been changed from a slow floating swarm of nanites hitting the enemies into a quick, winged dash across the battlefield hopefully hitting SOMEONE. But, to be honest, the regular combat is so much better now it feels like a worthy trade.

The Good

Okay, lets get into what rocks about this game because lord is there a lot to love here if you're a Gunpla fan.

The story is absolutely wonderful. It's not some Gundam-esque political thing, but rather a more light hearted tale. The game takes place in a Sword Art Online virtual MMO where everyone is represented by their current Gunpla. You make friends and build up a squad while trying to move up the ranks and learn about your new friends and potential new enemies all while something mysterious happens in the background. It's a great, lightweight story that almost feels close to the kind of stuff you'd find in Pokemon. In fact they even pay homage to it with something akin to an "Elite Four" type battle at one point way later in the game.

As much as I loved Gundam Breaker 3, they went a little to far with the story. The first half is this cool tale about saving a small business and arcade, but the second half of the story involves you fighting hackers by using your Gunpla to beat up data that has been transformed into other Gunpla while also stopping a terrorist plot to drop a massive satellite on a city below? It over reached just a bit.

Another great thing about the game are the customization options. I used to tell people that Gundam Breaker 3 let you really test what you could do with your kits. But it feels severely limited compared to what you can do in 4. You can actually put two different arms on your kit which I didn't think was needed until I actually tried and found out that you can make some genuinely awesome looking things with the right combination. You can even do unrealistic things now like alter the size of some of the pieces so they work better together. That's how I got Baund Doc's giant left arm and turned it into the left arm in the kit below!

Oh, forgot to mention that. An extra little thing for the real life Gunpla nerds...you can actually design your own boxes. Not only does this look cool, but if I make a kitbash in real life I can actually print off a box top for it which gets me so hyped.

All in all though, this game gives you practically everything a Gunpla fan would want. It's not necessarily for fans of the Gundam anime in terms of story but for fans like me who have been building these kits for what seems like forever, it's as close to heaven as we're gonna get.