| System: PS4*, Xbox One, PC, PS3, Xbox 360 |  |
| Dev: Dimps | |
| Pub: Bandai Namco | |
| Release: February 24, 2015 | |
| Players: 1 (2+ Online) | |
| Screen Resolution: 480p-1080p | Cartoon Violence, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes |
One thing that I actually don't like is the game’s hub world. I understand why it is there, so that you can interact with other players, see their character designs, and enter into multiplayer matches. That’s cool and all, but it basically means that all of the game’s content requires traveling around a map to access. It would have been much better if you could just access it with a menu. Heck, you could have still kept it on the hub world, and made menu access just a secondary function and we would have had the best of both worlds.
In fact, the worst thing the game has to offer is its menus. Overall, they were finicky and kind of hard to navigate, which is a shame because you’ll be spending a lot of time in them in order to customize your character. I would find myself going for long stretches of battles without accessing the menu to tweak my character, even though I should have, just because I didn’t want to have to deal with it.
The best times the game had to offer, however, were co-op missions with other created characters. While a mindless button mash fest may not be the best thing for competitive play, joining with a friend to button mash against the computer is a blast. Also, there’s just something so incredibly silly about seeing a Namekian with a Mohawk team up with a female Majin Buu in order to beat the crap out of kid Gohan for some reason. Like, I said, the game just makes all the parts of you that love fanfiction squee with glee.
Dragon Ball XenoVerse may not be the competitive DBZ game I was looking for, but it’s a fun Dragon Ball Z game nonetheless. At least it’s the first DBZ game in a very long time that doesn't just rehash the DBZ plotline again and again. I think this is what needs to happen as the DBZ franchise goes forward. We need to look for interesting new ways to make this same old universe appealing, and hey, allowing you to be a self-insert fanfiction character is certainly one of them.
You’ll get about 12-15 good hours out of Dragon Ball XenoVerse’s single-player and co-op missions, but you probably won’t touch it much after that. But hey, 15 hours is pretty good for a full price game these days. If you are a fan of DBZ, especially if you have ever written a piece of DBZ fanfiction or made a piece of DBZ fanart, you should probably give Dragon Ball XenoVerse a try.
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By Angelo M. D'Argenio Contributing Writer Date: February 24, 2015 |
Game Features:
