I’ve recently gotten my hands on Dragonball Xenoverse on the Playstation 4. Xenoverse is the first Dragon Ball game to appear on the next gen systems. I never had the pleasure of owning any of the previous Dragon Ball games on previous systems such as the famous Budokai trilogy, but I always heard great things and was always keen to give it a go, so I decided to delve in and have a crack.
On launch of the game you are greeted with a beautiful Akira Toriyama anime intro with a remix of Cha-La Head-Cha-La which was used in Dragon Ball Z which added a bit of nostalgia.
You then start with a quite a basic menu system, which includes game start & options which you can tweak your frame rate, graphics and general flashiness. Jumping into the game it starts with flash backs of some pretty big moments through the Dragon Ball Z series and you get the opportunity to fight through some of these moments. After a few fight scenes – it goes into some commentary with Shenron – our favourite DBZ dragon – stating that you’ve been summoned from a land far away and you are to come forth and travel through history to set things straight. Which leads into character setup – here you can choose your race, if you want to be female or male and have all sorts of different customisation features (See how my character ended up below).
Once this is complete your character will appear in front of Shenron saying farewell and you get teleported to the ‘Field of Time’ and Trunks approaches. You then have a few fighting trials to complete which give you a great experience into how the fighting mechanic works. Once these are completed you gain Trunks trust and you now have the opportunity to walk around the Field of time in Toki Toki City.
I instantly expected that I could go around and enter online battles & story mode from this point – however this wasn’t the case. I had to go around and talk to certain people – re-engage with trunks and do some other bits and pieces in order to unlock different modes, which I personally found a little bit long winded and for the person that just wants to pick up and play – it could get a bit frustrating.
Once the introductory piece is over – Toki Toki City becomes your portal to access new equipment, different modes and side quests and the fun finally begins!
At the moment – all I’ve really experienced is the story mode and vs mode. In story mode – you help out Trunks and get sent back through various moments of the series and fight along side some of your favourite characters. These moments are also a bit different from the original series source material – which I found was a nice touch and kept it from becoming stale and the same old Dragon Ball story re-hash. You also need to level up quite a bit to progress in the story mode as currently I’m up to fight vs Nappa – which is quite early on in the piece and he slaughters me every time. I’m assuming you can do this via various modes you have in game – but a good challenge none the less. Vs mode is very much the standard arena fights that you can thrash out with some mates and button mash to your hearts desire.
All in all , so far I’m impressed with Dragon Ball Xenoverse –
Graphically I think it looks fantastic with beautiful stylised cell shading, the game is fast paced and insanely fun and mindless – typically what you want out of a Dragon Ball game – you punch, kick, chuck magical beams out of your palms and you can hardly see what’s going on – but you know what – you don’t care because it looks awesome! I think that any novice can pick up their controller and have a good ol button mash and pull off some favourite Dragon Ball moves. This game will have a lot of re-playability and I’m looking forward to delving further with the story-mode, dabbling in some online battles and getting it out on regular basis for games nights.
