Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds
OpenCritic Rating
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds
All taken together, Phantom Breaker offers a couple hours of mindless, mass-bashing fun. It has some of the same charm as old-school beat'em up arcade games like Turtles in Time, but with an Japanese anime theme. It's fun for a time, but it passes quickly, and it's very easy to move on without looking back.
[F]or fans of the genre who love beating down countless enemies as cute anime girls and don't shy away from a serious challenge, they can expect to have a good time with Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds.
With a tidal wave of cutesy nostalgia and high-octane action thrown into the mix, Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds ends up being a relatively fun beat 'em up.
Altogether, Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds offers a great mix of insane action and intriguing story, though the combat is definitely the meat of the game. Slick, responsive controls and a variety of characters and abilities keep the game fresh.
This spin off of Phantom Breaker packs chibi-pixel art, two tracks of action, four characters, replayability, and some advanced button input potential. The lack of online multiplayer makes me a sad boy.
[T]he game, despite some of the shortcomings with its combat, is fun and charming that scratches an itch for people who like levelling up characters to take them through the difficulties, and as for what is available on the platform, you can do much worse than Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds.
All told, I wouldn't recommend Battle Grounds as a full-on game, but it is a fun time waster. The battles get boring and repetitive too quickly to entertain you for long, and that in turn ends up meaning your time is better spent elsewhere. While the game looks and runs great, the gameplay just lacks too much.
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds isn't going to convert anyone who sees beat 'em ups as mindless entertainment. Yet even when its ideas are half-baked in execution, the overwhelming style and ambition here make for one of the genre's more memorable entries in recent years. If you're in the market for a decent beat'em up, you'll have a tough time not to respecting 5pb's effort to breathe life into the genre.
