As a youngster I often spent hours watching Dragon Ball Z on TV channel Cartoon Network, it was up there with my favourites. Hence when given the opportunity to review Dragon Ball Z For Kinect (Xbox 360) I was rather excited, unfortunately I also had a slight feeling of pessimism too due to playing many Dragon Ball Z video games before. They can be hit and miss from my experience so let’s find out if this managed to hit to spot...
I may be out of the loop with the whole DBZ nowadays but there’s nothing more disappointing than loading up the game to an intro theme that doesn’t feel right at all. That’s something minor that most people wouldn’t notice nor really care, so we move onto the game itself. It’s immediately obvious that it’s going to lack in gameplay depth when there are only two modes, Story Mode & Score Attack. Other than that it’s just the usual Options menu and QR Code (scan special codes to unlock in-game characters/power-ups). With it being Kinect I must say navigation to access these modes is responsive and simple to use.
Story Mode is set up to follow the complete Dragon Ball Z Saga, revisiting famous battles from the Saiyan, Frieza, Android/Cell and Majin Buu individual sagas. Each fight is played in first person mode and the tutorial goes over all the basic moves plus how to perform a special attack. So let me pick one of my fights at random, why not begin with my first battle vs Raditz. Punching and kicking fast allows you to launch into rapid combos and to be honest apart from the ability throw a stronger punch or a charged up Ki blast, both of which are very simple to do, there’s is nothing else to do apart from the special move. As I was using Goku, it was time for the best (in my opinion) super move, Kamehameha which I’d pulled off once in the tutorial against a non-moving opponent. I attempt to charge up my stored Ki (the energy used for these) and it just wouldn’t recognise the pose that starts it charging, in the mean time I’m getting pounded. Crazily that’s the only action that it really struggles to recognise, the fact it’s a key factor in performing the most memorable moves makes it even more frustrating when it doesn’t work.
Sadly the rest of the fights turn into a flurry of punches with maybe the odd dodge if the AI manages to pull a move off, it becomes rather repetitive. Even the small cutscenes don’t quite have the impact I remember from the original scenes, whether it’s the poor voice work on some of the characters (Vegeta most notably is nothing like the one I know) or the lack of a tension creating musical score. Visually the character models are touched up and modernised beautifully for the HD era. The only bonus for carrying on through these battles is to reach the boss fight where they have thought a little bit out of the box, it’ll give you onscreen actions to perform quickly to help you overcome enemies like Giant Ape Vegeta. I enjoyed this far more but getting there was an absolute chore that I’d expect even younger gamers to get bored with.
Then we have Score Attack which is a kind of a re-hashed version of story mode where you fight previously beaten enemies using the character of your choice. The idea is to get as high a score as you can by using special moves or normal ones whilst resisting damage, also bonus multiplier for harder difficulties. This bored me to tears, I’ve beaten these guys once and that was bad enough, it’s terrible how much this game lacks in depth.
The main redeeming quality in this game is the exclusive brand new footage never before seen in Europe. The episode features Goku’s father Bardock in a sort of origin story for the legend of Super Saiyans, taking the viewer back where it all began. In a strange way it rekindled my love for the series, great high quality episode telling an important story. A must see for all the fans.
Overall it really lacks in anything substantial and any existing modes are marred by repetitiveness throughout. Despite having a huge roster of characters I just cannot overlook the obvious flaws plus despite Kinect being more responsive it still isn’t up to a standard where a fighting game can give the user a worthy experience. The only way I’d buy this is for the special episode, so in that case just rent it.
4/10