Saturday, February 28, 2015

Dragon Ball Xenoverse (PC)


It’s a bit difficult to pigeonhole Dragon Ball Xenoverse into a specific genre. It’s essentially a 3rd person fighting game with MMORPG trappings. If you’re one of the lucky few who managed to experience the short-lived Dragonball Online MMO, Xenoverse is basically that game wrapped around an updated iteration of the Budokai Tenkaichi series.

Gameplay

The game starts by dropping you in the middle of various fights between Goku and the franchise’s main villains – from Freiza to Cell, to Buu – but these are not full fights but a mere sampling of the gameplay you can expect when you get to the meat and bones of the game. It’s a trick that RPGs use regularly (re: start you off with a high leveled, fully-geared character and a strong boss monster before taking everything away and forcing you to fight rats.)

There’s no tutorial yet in this intro, but it’s easy to get a basic idea of the controls since there’s prompts appearing when you push buttons. Long time players of the Budokai Tenkaichi series might be familiar with the control schemes: you have two buttons for attacks, one for ki blast, and another for mobility. Then you have a key for lock-on, one for blocking, and trigger combinations that give you access to special and ultimate attacks.