We’ll get this out of the way right now. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is not a tournament fighter. You won’t roll-forward and punching any Hadoukens or throwing down against your buddies mano y mano.
Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is an insane mission based action game with a heavy emphasis on flying, mashing combos and perfectly timing charge moves.
With only one mission to play during my demo, I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the controls in time. On the DualShock 3, up was Square, X was down. Forward on the analog stick moved towards your target enemy, backwards was move away. Sideways revolved around an enemy like Earth does the sun.
Mashing circle punched a lot, and triangle charged energy attacks. Some buttons let you run faster, some let you fly faster. This is not an intuitive pick up and play title by any stretch.
Not to say it was horrible. My team of Goku, Krillin, Piccolo and Tienshinhan were able to handily defeat the evil Saiyan Nappa, but not without crashing into the ground a lot, pulling off special attacks I didn’t know how to do, or getting stuck in combos I couldn’t get out of. When I was on, though, I really felt like I was in the shoes of Goku.
Given more time with the controls, I think I would like Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z as a cheap weekend action game. It’s an original style of action game that doesn’t really have anything popular to compare it with in America.
Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z will be released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita in the spring of 2014.
