Epic Games Announces Battle Breakers for PC & Mobile

Epic Games is making the most of the Game Developers Conferences and it has announced Battle Breakers, an Unreal Engine 4 mobile and PC tactical role playing game.

Epic Games was pleased to announced Battle Breakers today, making the most of their Google Development Day keynote at the ongoing Game Developers Conference. Developed on Unreal Engine 4, of course, Battle Breakers is a tactical role-playing game designed for cross-platform play on both PC and mobile devices. The game will be free-to-play when it launches, but for those who are interested Epic is letting players to pre-register on the official website (or Google Play). By pre-registering, players will unlock the Dark Beastman character in-game at launch.

As stated in the announcement, Battle Breakers will have hundreds of recruitable heroes including ninjas, knights, robots, and dinosaurs. Players will level their heroes, then fight against squads of equally crazy selection of monsters from space. Donald Mustard, Worldwide Creative Director at Epic Games, describes the game like this:

"The team at Epic had this crazy idea that if we combined our passion for zany 80’s Saturday morning cartoons with our obsession for tactical turn-based RPGs, we might just create something awesome and unique. If you’re anything like us you’ll be humming the Battle Breakers theme and grinning from ear to ear as you battle your way to victory."

Although Battle Breakers may be a change in tone for Epic Games, which is right now also working on Paragon, Fortnite, Robo Recall, and the free-to-play Unreal Tournament reboot, there is precedent. Most importantly, Epic Games is the studio responsible for the Infinity Blade franchise on iOS. Beside their successful mobile history, it's very clear that Epic is experimenting with various monetization models for their modern games. A free-to-play gacha game is a low-investment, potentially high-reward opportunity. It fits in their current style perfectly.

Battle Breakers seems to be a gacha game, a largely popular genre of mobile games in Asia regions, though that's not yet confirmed. Gacha is focused on the player acquiring characters or units in-game through some sort of randomized draw or "roll" based on percentages. It's usually described as lighthearted gambling, considering gacha games typically letting players to buy more random draws, but never particular units themselves.

Battle Breaker is currently being developed and is planned to arrive later this year for PC, iOS, and Android devices. Epic Games did note that the game is in pre-release testing in the Philippines, so it might be closer to launch.