Battle of Saiyan Z Warrior

It mostly neglects the single most important thing that makes the fighting.

I had fun building a hero all my own, but her journey through the Battle of Saiyan lore is deflated by one-sided fights and combat that boils down to what feels like glorified button-mashing. I was ultimately left wanting more than the shallow, frustrating, and repetitive combat.

As much as I wanted to love the combat, I couldn’t. Every different combination of face buttons and resulting varying animations led to the same outcome: punching your opponent and making them fly far away from you. The strategy behind these fights never gets very deep, and I settled into a repetitive but effective pattern of punching and kicking a villain across the map, then charging up to get enough Ki to use an ultimate attack.

Defense is in the same boat: when an enemy starts to get a combo going, dodging isn’t worth the stamina cost and blocking requires almost psychic-like reflexes to pull off, meaning I never really used them. Instead, I helplessly took the assaults, then returned the favor until someone’s health invariably ran out.

With combat a lackluster affair, the most enticing part of XenoVerse is the ability to create your own fighter. From Saiyans to Namekians, there’s a wide range of races to choose from, each with unique stats and fighting styles. Everything from their gender, size, shape, and voice is customizable. I settled on Muu, a mute female Majin known for her high defensive capabilities, fast speed, and slow stamina recovery.

With character creation comes leveling up and stat allotment – an odd choice for a fighting game all about aliens with world-destroying energy beam powers and masculinity complexes to feature such heavy role-playing influence, but it’s cool to see a character I invested time in grow and ultimately become more powerful. The pacing of character progression in XenoVerse is great, as new powers and skills are unlocked gradually – and there are a lot of them. Crafting a skill set of hard-to-acquire special moves that worked with my fighter was half the fun.