Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Have you ever wondered why a goblin or a dragon is carrying a +2 Sword of Fire, or even a Potion of Mana when they died.  Normally you just figure you got fat loot, but in honesty, it really takes you out of the game, because it kills the sense of creeping in a grim and gritty dungeon.  Firefly Studios, the developers behind Space Colony and the Stronghold series of games, is looking to change the perception of dungeon crawling with their new title, Dungeon Hero.

First and foremost, Dungeon Hero is a dungeon game.  You are not running around in nicely decorate environments, but in a dirty and grimy dungeon, filled to the brim with monsters and goblins.  You character has been enlisted by good goblins to infiltrate a dungeon, to clear out the evil goblins that have taken over.  The “hero” that you play is not a hero in the sense of the world.  As a matter of fact, Simon Bradbury, lead designer on the project, made it clear that your hero is not a nice guy.  His goals are his own, even while he helps the good goblins in their siege of the dungeon.

The story being put together by the Firefly team is set to be very detailed, and will never be played out via cut scenes.  Instead, the game is planning to be very dialog based.  A good example is a when you are on a barge, floating through a goblin town, you will hear the townfolk discuss a beast that has halted supplies, and where it is located, giving you the heads up on a new mission you can undertake.  The point of this was to make the game more dynamic, and to keep you in the game, rather than cutting to a pre-rendered cut scene.  It is an interesting mechanic, but I wonder if players will get the idea of how it works. 

Combat happens in a Diablo-esque manner, with swarms of evil beasts looking to attack your character.  This pack-like combat will lead you to the directional combat that was being used in the game.  Evil creatures are normally created in these little spawn generators.  Your goal in combat is to work on destroying these spawn generators to cut down the pack that is attacking you.  Sounds easy enough until you are attacked by spellcasters, who will attack you from afar, giving you a choice of trying to take out the spell caster first, with the possibility of getting overrun by the bad guys, or go for the spawn generators, but risk death by magic missle.  The nice thing about combat is that it is designed to always be close up and personal.  Combat will always happen at an end-of-sword distance, meaning that if it is out of the range of your sword blade, you will probably not be able to hit it.  This gives the combat its dark and gritty feel, as you will always be right up in the face of the creatures that you are fighting.  Sometimes though, you will run into a battle that will be against one monster, like the picture at the beginning of this article.  For these battles, you will have to dodge around, while attacking the creature.  These battles look to be more like mini-boss battles, but that is just my take on it, and not what was said at the presentation.

Control aspects of the game are rather simple.  Movement is controlled with the left stick, while the four buttons control the type of attack you use.  There are thrusts, chop, slash and one other type of attack that can be used.  Using triggers or shoulder buttons, you will change the attack types.  For those that play the game on the PC, the controls will work out in a similar style to Assassins Creed, where you hold down a shift or control key while clicking the mouse to change up the attack styles. 

The goal of the game is to create a living, breathing dungeon, and at this point in development, the ambiance is there.  As we went through the three different levels that were being shown, the dungeon never felt pre-fabricated.  It had more of a carved from the earth look, with rocks jutting out in hallways, bones strewn about floors and just having a dirty feel to the levels.  Treasure never seemed to fall from the ass end of a creature, but would be found on the corpses of bodies, that had failed in their attempt before you.  The good goblins have built cities inside the cavernous structure that you travel through, bringing a new dynamic to a dungeon – a city full of inhabitants going about their daily lives in the middle of the foreboding place.

Currently the game is about a year out, so we did not get to see all the story elements that will be in the final product.  Also, some of the fighting mechanics and graphical elements are still being tightened up.  The game will be coming to both PC and 360, with the game being presented on a PC platform.  In his coy manner though, Simon did state that the game would be coming to an “as unannounced next gen platform” when I asked about a PS3 version, so hold out hope for this one PS3 owners.  One more item that was mention in the beginning of the presentation was a comparison game, to which Simon replied Dungeon Keeper.  Not in the sense of building a dungeon, but in the sense of creatures going about their business, living in a dungeon.  Look for Dungeon Hero in the Summer of 2009.