Disney Realm Breakers is the worst tower defense game and the worst Disney game I’ve ever played

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SHOULD I PLAY DISNEY REALM BREAKERS?

Do not play this, even if you like tower defense games. Disney Realm Breakers’ tower defense, base-building gameplay is ruined by its greedy gacha formula. This game is riddled with money-grubbing systems: gacha rolls, energy consumption meters, and terrible progression walls that make the experience slow and tedious. Even if you can get past all of that, the core gameplay just isn’t that fun to begin with.

TIME PLAYED

I played Disney Realm Breakers for four hours. I’ve reached Act 1 Chapter 9 and finished around three dozen story missions, while completing twenty-three tower defense stages and winning nearly twenty guild battles. I’ve leveled five characters to level ten and higher, and I’ve upgraded most of my buildings to level eight, with my town hall being level ten.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT DISNEY REALM BREAKERS?

• Disney characters and visuals. Disney Realm Breakers offers an enchanting dive into another multiverse of Disney and Pixar. The entire game takes on this adorable chibi art style where most of the environment and characters have this almost doll-like, cartoon look to them and it’s so cute.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT DISNEY REALM BREAKERS?

• Too messy and complicated. Disney Realm Breakers’ biggest flaw is that there’s just too much going on in the game and it confused me. The initially easy tower defense gameplay evolved into base-building and upgrading structures. Then I was introduced to gacha rolling for units, training characters, and ranking them up. Then I had to fight in guild battles with other online players against legions of enemies. The game just kept layering on new mechanics, game modes, and rules. I would have very much preferred just playing the tower defense missions over anything else, but due to progression walls, I was forced to dip into every part of the game.

• Boring gameplay. Of course, even if I had been allowed to stick with tower defense alone, that wouldn’t have necessarily won me over to liking the game. Disney Realm Breakers is incredibly boring and has no depth. I didn’t feel challenged or like I had to consider my strategy for a single moment. Even as someone who enjoys base-building games, I lost interest in the shallow offering here very quickly.

• Greedy to the max. From gacha pulls to energy consumption meters to premium shopping and time-skipping mechanics, Disney Realm Breakers has a ton of money-grubbing systems in place to slowly push players into pulling out their wallets. Even in the short time that I played, I was already hitting progression walls that seemed purposefully designed to make me want to spend money. And while you can technically stay free-to-play, don’t expect much reward for doing so; across the four hours I played, I was only able to roll fifteen times at the gacha. When you add in the ability to rank up units by pulling them multiple times and the obvious advantage that ultra rare gacha pulls have in battle, this quickly turns into a fully pay-to-win experience.

• Slow progression. Beyond a breezy first couple hours, Disney Realm Breakers slowed down significantly. It started off with me completing a few tower defense stages, but then as I continued playing, I got bombarded with multiple progression walls in the form of tasks that I needed to complete to unlock new stages, chapters, and story developments. These tasks such as leveling multiple structures and winning guild battles got progressively longer to complete due to their growing requirements and this repetitive flow of having to complete tasks to continue playing a pinch of the tower defense gameplay made the experience tedious.

PLATFORM TESTED

Android via Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G phone.