Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
Dragon Ball: Raging Burst is the latest traditional fighter to come out for the incredibly popular anime series. The Z-Fighters and all their friends and enemies come out to retell the most epic battles across the entire Dragon Ball Z saga.
What’s Hot
Dragon Ball fans have come to expect great fan service with their games. Raging Blast keeps the tradition alive with a ton of content that stays faithful to the series and explores weird “What If” situations. You can count on 70 fighters to choose from to get the energy balls flying. The stories are told through battle sequences that are key moments in the anime. Once you complete stages, you’ll start unlocking all the DBZ content packed away in Raging Blast.
Overall, the combat might be cumbersome but that doesn’t mean the special moves are hard to pull off. Watching the characters yell their signature attacks with the resulting mini-cinematic is a treat for the fans of the show. The landscapes are destructible and you can fight on the ground, air or in the oceans. This is an authentic DBZ game from start to finish and fans are likely to run out and buy the game for the roster alone. A fight between Gogeta and Vegetto might sound like an alien language to most people but for DBZ fans, this possibility is earth shattering.
What’s Not
The core of the game, the fighting, isn’t fun. DBZ characters or not, there are simply better fighting games that run circles around the Super Saiyans in Raging Blast. The controls are rather clunky for a fast-paced game and figuring out what move you want to do will take a long time studying the skill sets for each character. Or you can skip it all and rely on your signature moves to blast through an opponent’s life meter. If you can win. The AI in the game is brutal even at the normal settings and it’ll take many restarts to get a victory.
The camera is also a large hindrance in enjoying the fighting portions of the game. The battle environments are large and look faithful to the look of Dragon Ball. The problem comes from finding the edges of the arenas and getting the camera stuck on the sides. It is inevitable that you’ll be blind to the action while the camera is looking off into the distance as the opponent is mercilessly attacking you. In these cases, you have to make it back to the middle of the arena and take the cheap punches.
Final Word
While there is more content to please DBZ fans, this isn’t a great game. There have been many, many DBZ games created, most of them fighting games and Raging Blast does not rank among the best. If you are looking for a better DBZ fighting game, reach back into the past and pick one of those titles. There isn’t anything truly innovative brought to the table and the gameplay suffers from poor design.
