I would absolutely love to give this game a higher score but I can't due to it's jank, a really bad padding section, and multiple difficulty spikes. Other than that this is one of the most unique games I've played and I highly recommend everyone to play it. The story was sublime and just so damn cool. With every upgrade you got you felt more like some sort of superhero. When the combat works it works. It's fun fighting against a couple of enemies at a time. It's just when there's several enemies on the screen it's hard to play because of how easy you can get knocked down by an enemy you didn't see. But when the stars align and you fight the enemies properly you feel like a badass lol. The graphics were good for a 2004 game and the art direction was amazing. I really wish this game got a sequel that would've fleshed out and polished this game's general idea and design.

To attempt to break down what makes breakdown so good is a hard task for me, maybe it’s the slick, intensely immersive first person presentation that’s further enhanced by being able to utilize the strength from the XBOX, the strongest console at the time, maybe it’s twisty, badass 2000’s sci-fi narrative, or maybe, just maybe, its the fucking BEASTLY combat system, I’m not sure I even know how to put my liking for it into words, but goddamn if it isn’t satisfying and unique then I don’t know what is, you get so many combos and some are better than others at doing specific things like you wouldn’t deal with 1 guy the same way you deal with 3 guys, another thing that enhances the combat is the progression of both enemies and your power, the game does a great deal of work to build up and introduce most enemy types, like those buff dudes at the start, all you’ve been fighting are humans and then these dudes pop out of nowhere and have a horror introduction where you walk through the messes they made and then see them absolutely destroy groups of enemies you’d have trouble with, so now you know they’re not to be messed with and you should run the fuck away, which is a great thing, you simply run away from them until you gain enough power to beat the ever living shit out of them, that’s another thing, the power progression is hands-down the best there is, without spoiling anything, you get stronger and stronger as the game goes on and every single moment is cool as fuck and serves to introduce your abilities well, no limp-dick skill tree bullshit.

BREAKDOWN turns boys into men. And you better play it if you have any ounce of love for action media. Just be open-minded regarding it’s control scheme, and don’t forget to block!

The Original Soda Drinker

My man Derrick fucking loves soda. Drinking soda helps him heal after gunfights and battles with ancient warriors. While hallucinating an apocalyptic desert vista guess what this mad lad finds? A fucking soda machine. Dude can't get enough of it.

I have a lot of fondness for this game, I had an OXM demo disc with a demo and trailer for this that my sister and I were obsessed with, we thought it was the coolest game ever, and when I finally played it, it was the coolest game. I got filtered hard by the chase scene in the beginning though, and the difficulty is insane throughout. But I like fucked up difficulties and bizarre games, so this makes me think of stuff like Oni when I play it. can't recommend this to anyone though, you need a very specific taste for Breakdown.

I love almost everything about this game except for the fact that all of the cool, weird and unique ideas are attached to a first-person combat system that doesn't really work and, although it is tolerable for a fair bit of the game, eventually the difficulty ramps up to a point where every fight is as much of a battle against the clunky, awkward controls than it is the enemies.

There's also a truly terrible platforming section that it makes you do twice. That's not two similar sections but literally the same section, twice over, before the end of the game. With a couple of tweaks to the controls I think I'd be able to stick this one out to the finish (and I'm tempted at some point to use the Xbox's system level button binding stuff to switch around some baffling decisions, such as BLOCK on L3) but today is not that day. TO THE BIN!

This game is kind of shit and torturous to play but I thoroughly enjoyed this janky Japanese Xbox exclusive (a rarity to this day). There's so many bizarre ideas that are poorly implemented yet I can't help but get sucked into it, maybe it's my nostalgia for the era of games where the game bears everything about itself on it's sleeve without much pretense.
The dream sections are still very cool to play through and the checkpoint system is just unforgiving enough to keep me on edge during normal difficulty - there is a very specific way this game wants you to play and you have to accept that you're going to take a lot of damage, so enjoy watching Derrick eat half of an energy bar before chucking it away forever at least 200 times.

The game pulls a very cool trick on you too that you should stop reading here if you have any interest in playing:

At the start you're playing an extremely careful tactical """"shooter"""" (if you can even call this proper shooter gameplay), by the end you're raining explosive death from above and spamming laser beams at giant hulking masses from outside their effective AI range. Excellent stuff and despite the box art I did not expect it to get to this point. Nothing quite like it.
It's a shit game that I hate playing but I love it all the same. No-one wanted this ambitious project when it came out, but I'll take it if they won't have it, butt-rock credits and all.

people often naively complain about the state of the game industry and how overly saturated it is with generic, cookie-cutter garbage - then in the same breath they'll start panning and ignoring the actual cutting-edge titles that most push the envelope with innovative ideas

enter breakdown - a wildly misunderstood first-person genre mishmash with addicting combat, kickass powers, and a totally off-the-rails storyline. open your mind to its unconventional control schemes and you'll be met with one of the most creative, peculiar, and downright fun games you'll have played in years

the infamous final stretch also isn't that bad. it was doable on hard (albeit with a lot of trial and error) so i can't imagine normal being too tough considering how much softer the enemies hit

the "japanese take on half life" idea of breakdown is kind of hard to write off completely honestly, though it is different. want to call this an immsim even though that's not really correct, values realism of the choreography of your individual actions over providing a large multitude of possible interactions that're more streamlined in how they are perceived than they would be here. there's 3 kinds of food that are most of the health items in the game that aren't collected but eaten on the spot right then and there with very long animations, and a lot of exposition that isn't from character dialogue is exclusively in the form of clipboards your character flips each page of methodically, pretty much foregoing any system shockian wall scrawls or audio logs or other more varied conveyances of information. it really isn't concerned with "immersion" in how you perceive the world as much as being within derrick.

this kind of embodiment is also centered in the emphasis on hand to hand combat which requires an up close approach, with attention to enemy tells and your own attack distance/speed (and a surprising amount of combos/special attacks you can pull off if you experiment, even if their application can feel kind of crude), over controlling the level and utilizing varied modes of firepower that fpses prioritize. there are guns of course and you'll need them, but only 4 (except for THESE BABYS [fists][strong]) and they amount to locking on and hoping the bullets hit. and its definitely a slog at times with just how much you are fighting guys in empty corridors, but this was mostly not enough to be a big dealbreaker for me. in fact there is one point getting near the end of the game that i actually think it uses tedium pretty effectively, to emphasize how strong you become later on. that being said the un-lock-onable stealth t'lan are bad and FUCK that gauntlet in the big white room near the end in particular!!! shockwaves and neckbreakers are your only friends in this world.

i think the game is kept from being truly great partly from the above but mostly from a lack of strong connective tissue altogether. it has quite a few impactful moments and there's some interesting ideas within the twists of its sci fi story i think, but i feel disappointed with how little of it ties together satisfyingly. despite that i think its still largely good, this game feels kind of ahead of its time in its own immersive qualities and shows some ambition at times i find admirable, yet has a dumb fun wonky spirit that is irreplaceable. there's a part early on where you come into a cafeteria decorated with limp bloodied corpses, soft piano muzak playing from speakers to highlight the grimness of the scene, and then happen upon a hamburger on one of the tables for your character to aggressively grab, inspect with fascination like its an alien artifact, and then take a few chomps of in front of your camera and toss away. stuff like that is the heart of breakdown and puts its in stark contrast with the western fpses its compared with; its not so beholden to its representational atmosphere that it doesn't have a silly time with itself.

Anyway, time for the actual review.

Breakdown is undoubtedly one of the most creative, innovative and coolest games I've ever played and seeing it being brushed off and forgotten due to when and where it came out is heartbreaking.
The gameplay is nothing short of fantastic, making you feel like a total badass all the while even the slightest amount of carelessness or arrogance will result in your death, the game managing to combine a fantastic story and setting in the process.

My only real critique would be that the auto-aim is often times janky and some encounters can be a bit frustrating, but those are heavily outweighed by all the positives, mastering and properly learning the combat will lead you to an unforgettable experience that is a must-play for anybody who's a fan of action games or rather video games as a medium and what they can be.

Tried playing this on Xemu but it looks and runs terribly. With a very good PC, it looks like you can make it run properly, but visual glitches will remain and they are so bad you'll find yourself able to see what's behind many doors or around the corner through the walls.

Even if I were to play this properly, I dunno how much I could get into this, honestly. Things that should be simple in a first person game like picking things up or reloading are unnecessarily complicated, janky and have long animations. Gotta enter "arm mode", gotta aim to what you wanna grab, gotta press the button to eat the food.
After the second gunfight or so, I ran out of ammo and couldn't find any on the guys I killed, though from what I see on videos, they should have it. I "arm mode'd" everywhere, didn't see anything, didn't pick anything up except one ration. Next encounter, tried punching them but it didn't seem doable to fistfight 3 guys yet at that stage of the game.

Maybe some other time, but until then, I think I'll remain Zeno Clash Gang.

Breakdown has always had low ratings because the audience expects it to be a competent first-person shooter. They realize the guns don't work in a conventional way and drop the game after an hour, which is understandable. Breakdown is not a good FPS. Instead, Breakdown excels as an extremely ambitious, immersive, and downright insane first person beat 'em up made by the Tekken development team. Breakdown is more of an action beat 'em up than a FPS. It is important to understand that the game is all about punching, blocking and dodging rather than shooting and reloading. Once you get into the right mindset, you are experiencing one of the most surprising gems of the sixth generation.

It's really not very good, though I'm happy to have played through it one more time. It did a few interesting things for the time but 14 years on it's a pretty painful experience when looking at things like shooting, platforming and the whole target lockon system. The field of view is way too tight, not helped by it being 4:3 only, movement is slow and clunky with some bafflingly long sections of just walking slowly through large featureless corridors or fields (there's a hugely annoying jumping puzzle bit near the end), and it's very easy to get disoriented with the hit reactions - all downsides of the game design in their own way.

At the same time though, there's cool stuff there that you can see struggling to get out; the forced perspective means that they can play with your perceptions with hallucinations (something which they needed to do way more of) and it "solves" the problem of the player not looking where he wants by just jerking your view over. The start is particularly good at this but they just didn't take enough advantage; there's hardly anything you can interact with that isn't essential to the plot, it gets too concerned with its own cleverness when picking up items and the whole thing feels like it was drastically cut back.

In the end, while it starts strong it just kind of sags towards the middle and doesn't really pay off in the end with the time travel plot. The horrible nu metal ending theme is still very much present in the credits though, so that's something to look forward to at the end of 6-7 hours I guess? I'd recommend that if anyone does play it, do it in easy. There's one encounter near the end which I remember spending hours bashing my head against but I just walked through it this time.

We don't get first-person brawlers very often, last one I played was the bizarre piece of Zeno Clash back in 2012.

Breakdown is very unique and fun to play, I was really invested in its sci-fi story with all those unexpected twists and turns. Combat mechanics, although aged and wonky, are really fun, and button combination is pretty decent. Soundtrack is TOP-TIER.

Definitely a game hard to master, I was about to drop half a star because of the ridiculous difficulty spike near the end of the game that absolutely kills the pacing and turns the fun into a tedious shore, but it wouldn't be fair since the rest of the game is excellent and really entertaining.

Another IP Microsoft should definitely dig up from the ground and get it its deserved sequel teased at the finale.

I don't think this game is for everyone, the basic combat and the slightly janky controls won't get any better, you do get other abilities and moves that help you progress through the game but it'll still be janky and maybe somewhat hard depending on your skill level. If you're willing to accept the jank you'll be rewarded with a down to earth story about a man becoming extremely powerful to save the people he cares about and the whole world while dealing with some really corny stuff going on all over around you. Genuinely it's a game that despite the flaws it shines with charm and a funny sense of humour (even accidental)
Great music