Abstract: The impact of breaking waves is regarded as the main reason for the sliding failure of breakwaters. However, the impact process is not deeply understood due to its turbulence feature, and the breakwater designing procedure under the impact condition requires to improved likewise. Therefore, the paper reviews the research of breaking wave impact on breakwaters. First, an overview of the research in the past 80 years is presented. The research has been divided into three stages: starting, explosive, and conquering, and the feature and achievement of each stage are summarized. Second, attentions are taken to four aspects of the impact process research, namely, impact classification, peak impulsive pressure, pressure oscillation, and scale effect. Finally, the two aspects of the research on impulsive wave force, that is, impulsive wave force calculation and dynamic response of breakwaters against breaking wave impact, are reviewed. The result indicates that the presence of air is the crux of the research and quantizing the uncertainty introduced by air is the important research direction of this issue. Although all the second-generation impulsive wave force calculation methods yield conservative results, the problems of applicability and result consistency still exist, which means that establishing reasonable and uniform impulsive wave force calculation methods, as well as developing breakwater stability analysis methods under dynamic conditions is the long-term goal of this issue.