Epic Games has apparently been up to more than making regular changes to Fortnite and causing havoc in the digital PC maketplace with the Epic Games Store. The games company has also been quietly developing its own free-to-play tactical roleplaying game called Battle Breakers, and it released on November 13 to pretty much no fanfare whatsoever.
The game now sits on the Epic Games Store waiting for anyone with a hankering for some hexagonal warfare to pick it up and give it a try. It's also available on the Apple App Store and Google Play for who prefer to strategize on the go.
The game's plot, such as it is, seems to exist solely to justify the presence of fighting and gacha mechanics in the game world. There's monsters from space, they've trapped the world's heroes in crystals. You have to fight the monsters and free the thousands of heroes from the crystals so that they can fight alongside you.
You would preferably free the monsters using real-world money. Epic would like that very much.
At first glance, the basic premise of the game feels like an attempt to mimic the success of Nintendo's uber-popular mobile game Fire Emblem Heroes. Heck, the tutorial even shows a chart of strengths and weaknesses that looks more than a little bit familiar...
Unfortunately for Epic, however, Battle Breakers doesn't have the same franchise familiarity as Fire Emblem – a familiarity that likely played no small role in convincing countless fans to lighten their wallets in hopes of unlocking their favorite characters.
That said, it would be a mistake to completely dismiss Battle Breakers as a Fire Emblem Heroes clone. Its battles have nothing to do with maneuvering units into the right position -- instead, the focus is on strategic use of the right abilities at the right time. It's almost more of a puzzle game than a tactical RPG, really.
So, will Battle Breakers end up achieving the same level of success for Epic as Fortnite? Of course not, that's the kind of success a company only ever achieves once. But it might just fill a niche that'll gather some gamers' attentions.
Source: Polygon