Breakers Collection

Kids today will never truly understand just how many fighting games were released in the 1990s. I could spend the next ten minutes doing nothing more than listing off the dozens (if not hundreds) of one-on-one brawlers created in the wake of Street Fighter II’s success, and that’s just on the Neo Geo. While that might be slight hyperbole, the truth is that SNK was juggling a lot of fighting franchises at one time. In fact, the Neo Geo had so many fighters that you’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Breakers, a series that was completely overshadowed by Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters, World Heroes, Fatal Fury, The Last Blade and a whole avalanche of more popular games. Now, nearly thirty years after introducing the world to Condor Heads and Lee Dao-Long, Breakers is back in a brand-new collection from QuByte Interactive that includes both the Neo Geo original, as well as the 1998 sequel – Breakers Revenge. With online play and extras added in for good measure, this is QuByte’s most ambitious retro game collection yet. But is it any fun? Find out now when I review Breakers Collection.

Let me take you back to 1996. It has been five years since Street Fighter II first hit arcades and fighting games are going through something of a transition. Arcades that were once lined with 2D games powered by pixel graphics are now filled with cabinets with weird names like Tekken, Virtua Fighter and Soul Edge. With all eyes on the 3D landscape, you might think this would be a terrible time to launch a new 2D fighting game. And, unless you are Capcom releasing a bunch of Street Fighter spin-offs and sequels, you would be right. But that didn’t stop Visco from releasing Breakers, a modest Neo Geo fighting game that felt like a throwback to a simpler time, even in 1996.

If you’ve played a fighting game from the early 1990s, then you’re going to feel right at home with Breakers. We get the usual assortment of colorful characters, including a young karate champ, a masked fencer from Italy, a Native American grappler named Condor, a female fighter famous for her kicks and even an undead novelty character from ancient Egypt. What’s interesting about this group is that they don’t go head-to-head with their clones, but rather fight slightly different alter-ego versions of the characters. For example, karate champ Sho will duke it out with Jin, while Red Gigers is the palette-swapped version of Condor. That’s a unique twist, even if these new characters are essentially renamed clones.

The gameplay is also familiar, especially for people who sharpened their teeth on Neo Geo staples like Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters. There are both light and hard punches and kicks, along with the typical quarter-circle motions that throw fireballs, wind up spinning kicks and so much more. There is also a super meter that can be charged up three times during a fight, allowing each character to perform several different extra-powerful special moves, most of which are pulled off similar to what you saw in Super Street Fighter II. This ends up being a big part of the fight strategy, and a well-placed super move can really change the momentum of a fight.

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I think it’s fair to say that Breakers didn’t set out to revolutionize the genre, but rather wanted to be another good (if not familiar) fighting game. And I’ll give it that, Breakers is a good mid-90s fighter. The characters handle well, it has a fun cast, the special moves are easy to pull off and the backgrounds are full of detail. Sure, it feels a lot like a clone and doesn’t have the personality of something like Fatal Fury or World Heroes, but I found myself less critical of that all these decades later. Divorced from the context of what was happening to the industry in 1996, this is just a fun, old fighting game that is familiar enough to bring back a wave of nostalgia, but different enough to keep you engaged after the good memories wear off.

On top of the original game, this collection also comes with Breakers Revenge, the 1998 sequel that is somehow even more obscure than the original. This follow-up adds cool new fighter named Saizo who not only wields fire, but also seems to have control over the animal kingdom. He is joined by Huang Bai-Hu, the end boss who is now playable in this sequel. Revenge also rebalances the roster, adds a few more moves and polishes up the presentation, including completely redesigning the life bars. It’s a cool update that makes some important changes, but it falls short of being the true sequel Breakers deserves.

Thankfully, QuByte Interactive didn’t fall short when it came to making this classic game collection. In a lot of ways, this is the company’s most ambitious compilation yet, adding enough new bells and whistles to elevate it above the original releases. That’s certainly the case when it comes to the online multiplayer mode, which is a lot more robust than I was expecting. Although this online mode is limited to Breakers Revenge, it does offer both ranked and casual battles, along with a battle lobby and online replays you can download and watch. Best of all, this compilation supports rollback netcode and crossplay between systems. It’s great being able to connect with other fans around the world, something that is normally reserved for the bigger (and more well-known) fighting games.

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It's also worth mentioning that QuByte has given Breakers fans a brand-new team battle mode, where you select a group of two different combatants, somewhat reminiscent of The King of Fighters. While not my favorite way to play the game (and it is a bit comical that you’re asked to make a two-person team with only eight fighters), I love that there’s more to do beyond the usual arcade and versus modes. The only downside is that you can’t take these two-person teams online. That’s a bit disappointing.

There are a couple other extras packed into the collection, but none of them as big as online multiplayer or three-person teams. There’s a somewhat interesting text interview with producer Tetsuo Akiyama, who goes into his start in the games industry and how Breakers came to be. It’s brief, but informative. Other extras include an art gallery and a sound test, something we didn’t get with the original 1996 release.

In a lot of ways, this is the best-case scenario for a game like Breakers. It would have been so much easier to simply port the games and stop there, but QuByte has taken a lesser-known fighting series and given it the all-star treatment. I can’t imagine a single fan of these cult classics being disappointed, and the fact that you can connect with other players around the world should make this reasonably-priced compilation a must buy for anybody into old school fighters. Breakers may not be my favorite Neo Geo brawler, but a package this good is hard to pass up.