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Dragon Ball: Raging Blast Review - Xbox 360

Introduction

Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is the latest installment of the long-running Dragon Ball games appearing on consoles. Just as there have been a heap of different series, and spin offs set in the Dragon Ball universe, there have been plenty of games over the years. Dragon Ball: Burst Limit, was the first of the series to appear on the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, and was fairly well received at time. Namco-Bandai recently obtained the rights to the Dragon Ball games for the next five years, taking over from previously publisher Atari. This time Goku moves from the traditional 2D cell-shaded world, to a full 3D style, while offering the same Dragon Ball oozing fighting experience.

Gameplay

To start with, you have a tutorial Dojo mode which takes you through the basics of the game. This works pretty well, as otherwise things can be a bit confusing, especially for those who have never played the previous games. You can choose to skip this if you want to get right into the action.

The main part of the game is Dragon Ball Collection, which gives you the option of playing various story-arcs from the Dragon Ball series. These consist of a number of set battles based upon storylines, worlds, and characters from the series, as well as some hypothetical match ups.  Most of it won't make much sense to anybody other than the Dragon Ball fan, or even those that are! Things are kept very simple, a paragraph of story at most, and a bit of a verbal spar at the start of each battle. It keeps things moving from simple fight to fight, but as a fighting game, there isn't a lot there in terms of complex "story".

Apart from the storyline mode, there are plenty of others to keep you entertained including standard Vs Battles, Survival, Score Attack, Time Attack, Knock Out, all of which you can play against the computer or your friend. World Tournament mode allows up to 16 players to battle each other at a time, and can be played online for some crazy battles. If there aren't enough human players, the computer can fill the spare slots.

This time around, players can take to battling online, which provides competition at any day or night against varied opponents in versus or tournament battles. As expected, due to the cult nature of the series, there are plenty of players who are pretty into the game, and many provide very tough competition. An overall ranking system is used so that players can see how they are faring against other 'Blasters' in the world.  Everything moved pretty smoothly, and online is definitely a good added attraction for the game over Dragon Ball: Burst Limit.

Drawing from the massive Dragon Ball universe does have its benefits, and there is a massive number of playable characters, apparently some 70 in all, most of which are unlocked as ...

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