This is one of the nicest 2s I will ever give because this game is honestly really fun and has soul in its soullessness but also has the overall quality of a bootleg graphic tee handed down to you by someone who had worn it daily for a year in high school. A fuckton of the low reviews read like extreme copium after quitting following a few losses in a row. Others are probably pretty reasonable, and I have a lot of shit to fling at this game as well. I'll do what I can to cover as much as possible here.
This game makes so many random missteps and has so many ideas thrown at the wall at once that it's laughable. To get this game you mix elements of Fortnite-ish movement/gliding, a Dead By Daylight-ish premise, Source/GMod-ish Prop Hunt mechanics, weirdly Breath of the Wild-ish feeling climbing and item spam, and the shittiest parts of Dragon Ball Xenoverse-ish combat, and lastly but certainly not least, a gacha system. It feels really dumb to throw together all these direct game comparisons but I think it best illustrates just how messy the package is. And man is it a fun mess.
The game feels pretty decent to play, I'd say, though the camera's level of freedom leaves a lot to be desired for the Raider while the Survivors feel just a bit too sluggish. Using and switching items as a Survivor can also be a bit clunky and locking on with melee or ranged attacks for either party can also randomly fuck up at times. That in particular seems to be an artifact of the game being built from Xenoverse.
Speaking of which, this game being a Xenoverse 2 asset flip is fucking hilarious to me. Both DBXV games already felt weirdly cheap and MMO-ish in a number of respects, and so that trickles even further down into this game. I think the main direct effects here are that character creation is quite limited in comparison to Xenoverse 2, and obviously enough the game ends up looking worse because of the terrible lighting the Xenoverse games have. The hub area is a small circle with like 4 or 5 little buildings in it and slightly over a half a dozen NPCs, though that number is reduced by a lot if you ignore the shopkeepers/mailboxes. It comes across as the Xenoverse version of someone's RPG Maker test town that they make with default tiles before actually putting together a real map. It's super funny. As for something a bit sadder, though, the Raiders seemingly don't have a lot of new assets of most kinds added on, which I was kinda hoping they would considering how important they are to the game. Higher-quality models and animations would be great for them. All we really get is what I assume are new voice lines you can equip to them.
Those Raider voice lines as well as some basic sticker-like messages and barely usable emotes are the only ways players can communicate with each other ingame, by the way. It's really goofy cause some of them are spammable even in the loading screen, leading people to do things like spamming the fusion dance parts to floss or using the crouching emote to no longer be visible on screen.
Now to the actual copium. This game has a lot of small bite-size systems working together at once, particularly for Survivors, which seem pretty overwhelming at first glance. You pick up on it, though, and I'd say somewhere in the first 5-10 hours you get to a point of competency even without having checked any online tips or guides. If you do, that time decreases. The game's tutorial sucks a lot and might as well not even be in the game. I'd imagine it's frustrating for people to get wasted by the Raider on their first few tries and then just assume Survivors are extremely weak and underpowered. Funny enough, though, they're not. They're arguably stronger than most Raiders when you have a team of relatively competent Survivors. There will always be Raiders who are good enough at the game to even sweep skilled Survivors, but in general if you can reach the point of the final Super Time Machine event with good timing, you as a team of Survivors will very likely win through one of your three win conditions. It almost becomes hard to lose once you figure out the best ways to trick the Raider you're playing with. In short, people calling the Survivors too complicated or weak is some copium that is easily remedied by just playing the game for a couple hours or going online and looking up one of the likely 3-4 questions about the game that you might have. If the game doesn't grip someone for long enough to want to do that, fine, but it's not a really high wall to climb in my opinion compared to other competitive or semi-competitive games I've played.
I think the more legitimate criticism comes from those who despise the gacha system the game has as well as its grind and the low drop rates for the premium currency or just dislike the lack of content. The microtransactions in this game don't really show up much at all if you consistently play but even if you do, you will still notice a constant mild push for the game to want you to spend just a little extra. The gacha as of season 1 is extremely barebones with very few potential pulls, so at the very least the gacha itself barely provides much incentive to spend money on it. Even so, I do agree it's scummy and gross that the game even offers those microtransactions at all.
I suppose my advice if someone is wanting to actually play this game and is considering buying the special edition is to just save the extra $10 and either spend it on the premium currency instead or just don't spend it at all. The premium currency you get with $10 will probably do more for you than the items you get from the special edition of the game, as the premium currency at least lets you pick what you want. Of course, there isn't too much to want due to the lack of content and the general low quality of the game's assets. Those and a lack of many maps, as well as very low Raider customization, are pretty disappointing and bring things down further. I think since I'm listing off things they fucked up, the item balance seems kinda bad and also a lot of the items are nearly unexplained without going into Practice Mode and trying them out for yourself. Probably not good to have most of your equipment be unintuitive even after a tutorial. I'm hoping that if nothing else we'll at least get more variety in items in the future, as well as maybe even some more items the Raider can pick up or steal.
I think that reminds me that in general, the game feels like it's missing content. It's hard to put a finger on it, but the smallness of everything and the low numbers for everything other than item prices comes across as being part of a game that is between 2/3 and 3/4 complete. I don't think I have too much more to say on that, but it's just weird. They probably should have waited one more month before the release to just... I dunno, improve the hub world at the very least.
As for what I get out of the game, I can name a few things. I find that the game's an interesting take on the Dragon Ball universe and the fact that it mostly ignores Super is pretty cool to me. I wouldn't be mad if some Super characters got added for whatever reason later, but the cast being fully DB/Z at the moment is neat. The create-a-character part of things is also fun to work with even with the limited options, although I think the saddest limitation imported from Xenoverse is only being able to play as a human. This probably isn't a problem for most people but I really would prefer to play one of the many non-human animal species found in Dragon Ball in the past. Still, the accessories and outfits can be cool and silly or a mix of both, and I appreciate that. I hope prices are reduced for the sake of the grind being less terrible, and I also hope more items get added with further seasons. The moment-to-moment gameplay is also just a fun little loop and a single game doesn't really run more than 8-12 minutes, either. Part of what makes it particularly fun to me, as well as probably my main reason for buying this game at full price as a preorder in the first place... well, that one's a secret. But trust me, it's a multifaceted reason that makes the whole thing more than worth it for me. I don't think most people would care about that part, though, so whatever.
This game is fucking horrible but I find it fun. A lot of the shitty aspects are ones I wouldn't trade for anything else, at least unless the entire game were improved along with those aspects all at once somehow. But even then, something about the low quality and low effort is charming and appealing. Something about the stupidity is infectiously goofy. Hell, as shitty as the microtransactions are, they're at least simple enough to ignore for the most part at the moment. I really hope they remove or rework that stuff, though. I hope the game in general gets supported for long enough to actually become good. It's weird to say it but I actually kinda recommend this game to Dragon Ball and asymmetrical multiplayer game fans if they find the game on sale, especially since it's so cheap even as it is now. Maybe it's because I've played so many properly bad and unfun games this year, but I found this game to be a breath of fresh (low-quality) air that I think others could totally get into too as long as they're aware of the barrier for entry. It's certainly not a good game right now but it did make an impact with its crappy style. Something something Power Glove.
This game makes so many random missteps and has so many ideas thrown at the wall at once that it's laughable. To get this game you mix elements of Fortnite-ish movement/gliding, a Dead By Daylight-ish premise, Source/GMod-ish Prop Hunt mechanics, weirdly Breath of the Wild-ish feeling climbing and item spam, and the shittiest parts of Dragon Ball Xenoverse-ish combat, and lastly but certainly not least, a gacha system. It feels really dumb to throw together all these direct game comparisons but I think it best illustrates just how messy the package is. And man is it a fun mess.
The game feels pretty decent to play, I'd say, though the camera's level of freedom leaves a lot to be desired for the Raider while the Survivors feel just a bit too sluggish. Using and switching items as a Survivor can also be a bit clunky and locking on with melee or ranged attacks for either party can also randomly fuck up at times. That in particular seems to be an artifact of the game being built from Xenoverse.
Speaking of which, this game being a Xenoverse 2 asset flip is fucking hilarious to me. Both DBXV games already felt weirdly cheap and MMO-ish in a number of respects, and so that trickles even further down into this game. I think the main direct effects here are that character creation is quite limited in comparison to Xenoverse 2, and obviously enough the game ends up looking worse because of the terrible lighting the Xenoverse games have. The hub area is a small circle with like 4 or 5 little buildings in it and slightly over a half a dozen NPCs, though that number is reduced by a lot if you ignore the shopkeepers/mailboxes. It comes across as the Xenoverse version of someone's RPG Maker test town that they make with default tiles before actually putting together a real map. It's super funny. As for something a bit sadder, though, the Raiders seemingly don't have a lot of new assets of most kinds added on, which I was kinda hoping they would considering how important they are to the game. Higher-quality models and animations would be great for them. All we really get is what I assume are new voice lines you can equip to them.
Those Raider voice lines as well as some basic sticker-like messages and barely usable emotes are the only ways players can communicate with each other ingame, by the way. It's really goofy cause some of them are spammable even in the loading screen, leading people to do things like spamming the fusion dance parts to floss or using the crouching emote to no longer be visible on screen.
Now to the actual copium. This game has a lot of small bite-size systems working together at once, particularly for Survivors, which seem pretty overwhelming at first glance. You pick up on it, though, and I'd say somewhere in the first 5-10 hours you get to a point of competency even without having checked any online tips or guides. If you do, that time decreases. The game's tutorial sucks a lot and might as well not even be in the game. I'd imagine it's frustrating for people to get wasted by the Raider on their first few tries and then just assume Survivors are extremely weak and underpowered. Funny enough, though, they're not. They're arguably stronger than most Raiders when you have a team of relatively competent Survivors. There will always be Raiders who are good enough at the game to even sweep skilled Survivors, but in general if you can reach the point of the final Super Time Machine event with good timing, you as a team of Survivors will very likely win through one of your three win conditions. It almost becomes hard to lose once you figure out the best ways to trick the Raider you're playing with. In short, people calling the Survivors too complicated or weak is some copium that is easily remedied by just playing the game for a couple hours or going online and looking up one of the likely 3-4 questions about the game that you might have. If the game doesn't grip someone for long enough to want to do that, fine, but it's not a really high wall to climb in my opinion compared to other competitive or semi-competitive games I've played.
I think the more legitimate criticism comes from those who despise the gacha system the game has as well as its grind and the low drop rates for the premium currency or just dislike the lack of content. The microtransactions in this game don't really show up much at all if you consistently play but even if you do, you will still notice a constant mild push for the game to want you to spend just a little extra. The gacha as of season 1 is extremely barebones with very few potential pulls, so at the very least the gacha itself barely provides much incentive to spend money on it. Even so, I do agree it's scummy and gross that the game even offers those microtransactions at all.
I suppose my advice if someone is wanting to actually play this game and is considering buying the special edition is to just save the extra $10 and either spend it on the premium currency instead or just don't spend it at all. The premium currency you get with $10 will probably do more for you than the items you get from the special edition of the game, as the premium currency at least lets you pick what you want. Of course, there isn't too much to want due to the lack of content and the general low quality of the game's assets. Those and a lack of many maps, as well as very low Raider customization, are pretty disappointing and bring things down further. I think since I'm listing off things they fucked up, the item balance seems kinda bad and also a lot of the items are nearly unexplained without going into Practice Mode and trying them out for yourself. Probably not good to have most of your equipment be unintuitive even after a tutorial. I'm hoping that if nothing else we'll at least get more variety in items in the future, as well as maybe even some more items the Raider can pick up or steal.
I think that reminds me that in general, the game feels like it's missing content. It's hard to put a finger on it, but the smallness of everything and the low numbers for everything other than item prices comes across as being part of a game that is between 2/3 and 3/4 complete. I don't think I have too much more to say on that, but it's just weird. They probably should have waited one more month before the release to just... I dunno, improve the hub world at the very least.
As for what I get out of the game, I can name a few things. I find that the game's an interesting take on the Dragon Ball universe and the fact that it mostly ignores Super is pretty cool to me. I wouldn't be mad if some Super characters got added for whatever reason later, but the cast being fully DB/Z at the moment is neat. The create-a-character part of things is also fun to work with even with the limited options, although I think the saddest limitation imported from Xenoverse is only being able to play as a human. This probably isn't a problem for most people but I really would prefer to play one of the many non-human animal species found in Dragon Ball in the past. Still, the accessories and outfits can be cool and silly or a mix of both, and I appreciate that. I hope prices are reduced for the sake of the grind being less terrible, and I also hope more items get added with further seasons. The moment-to-moment gameplay is also just a fun little loop and a single game doesn't really run more than 8-12 minutes, either. Part of what makes it particularly fun to me, as well as probably my main reason for buying this game at full price as a preorder in the first place... well, that one's a secret. But trust me, it's a multifaceted reason that makes the whole thing more than worth it for me. I don't think most people would care about that part, though, so whatever.
This game is fucking horrible but I find it fun. A lot of the shitty aspects are ones I wouldn't trade for anything else, at least unless the entire game were improved along with those aspects all at once somehow. But even then, something about the low quality and low effort is charming and appealing. Something about the stupidity is infectiously goofy. Hell, as shitty as the microtransactions are, they're at least simple enough to ignore for the most part at the moment. I really hope they remove or rework that stuff, though. I hope the game in general gets supported for long enough to actually become good. It's weird to say it but I actually kinda recommend this game to Dragon Ball and asymmetrical multiplayer game fans if they find the game on sale, especially since it's so cheap even as it is now. Maybe it's because I've played so many properly bad and unfun games this year, but I found this game to be a breath of fresh (low-quality) air that I think others could totally get into too as long as they're aware of the barrier for entry. It's certainly not a good game right now but it did make an impact with its crappy style. Something something Power Glove.