Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z incorporates revolutionary team battling for up to 4 players together in cooperative play against a host of fearsome opponents or in a giant 8-player battle royale. With four different battle types, breath-taking visuals faithful to the inimitable Dragon Ball universe, plus full-featured solo play for those days when you want to bathe in the glory alone, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z represents the next essential evolutionary phase in the illustrious history of the franchise...

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is the latest game in the popular franchise. This time around things have been ramped up a notch. Instead of choosing which player you want and having a set group for each mission, you can choose four characters to play with. This gives a more personal feel to the game. When choosing your team you are given the choice to change the colour of your characters - a pretty cool feature to have, especially with some of the more unusual characters such as Frieza.

The story is split up into four main sagas: Saiyan, Frieza, Cell Games and Majin. There is also a separate story mode in each saga for the villains. As you play through the game you unlock single levels to play which have no relation to the main story but are included as a bit of additional fun. There are also missions where you battle against villains not directly linked to the story. And, ever now and then, you are confronted with bosses that have a lot of health and several parts to attack. This game is also the first to introduce super saiyan god Goku, Beerus and Whis, which is featured in an extra saga after you have completed the game.

The graphics in this game are impressive, keeping faithful to the Dragon Ball Z look. Every level is large and open and almost all have destructible elements to them. The music is also worthy of note, adding much atmosphere to the game.

Unfortunately, the combat system is a little basic. It can get very repetitive, especially if you are the type to favour melee, but there is a lot of variety in special abilities. Each character has their own unique abilities which can be activated by pressing the left bumper. One interesting thing that has been added to this game is an energy bar which can be filled by doing things that link with other team members. When the bar reaches a certain point you can activate an ability called a super attack. Some characters have an ultimate attack which can be used under certain level conditions.

After each battle your overall rank is increased which is just for show. However, when each character, that is being controlled by the AI, ranks up their support ability increases allowing them to be more helpful and a stronger backup. For some missions getting your support characters levels up is one of the best ways to complete that mission. The other way to get stronger is by equipping cards that can be acquired in various ways.

Cards are one of the main forms of increasing your characters power in this game. Each character has various stats that increase certain aspects such as melee damage and special attack damage, and for each of these abilities there are between 2-5 slots where you use cards to increase them. One of the best ways to get cards is by doing missions, some of which can be repeated to get powerful cards. Another way is to buy them using Dragon Ball points there are also premium items which can be bought but are hard to come by.

Overall this is a decent game but can get boring fairly quickly, even though there is a lot of content. The difficulty is also a little uneven. You can storm through the first half of the game, only to then get stuck on almost every mission from there on. In addition, the mission to unlock super sayian 2 and 3 Goku is ridiculously hard, even after finishing the game. I found this to be a bit of a stupid thing and and for me was something of a game spoiler. Otherwise it is still a fairly good game but not worth the full price, unless you are a hardcore Dragon Ball fan.

6

Carl Simpson