Note: This is an updated review. I went back and figured out how to do stuff, though the guy was an idiot in how he was explaining it. I also discovered some ‘features’ that will probably make most people not want to play this game period.
Dragonball Z: Heroes United is a Dragonball Z (duh!) game based off the Legacy of Goku GBA series, which are based off of Dragonball Z. Players, instead of creating their own character, choose from a fairly extensive list of characters.
Game Mechanics and Features:
Combat: Macro based: As far as I can tell it’s a macro based game that only uses 4 keys. To use any sort of tech you’ll have to scroll your tech list one at a time to select an attack. This got tedious like a minute after I started using it. You’ll find your self continually scrolling a through a growing list of techs, and looking from the tech list the size of it seems to triple, and I was using a character that didn’t have that many techs compared to others. Fighting in this game must be incredible boring beam spammage. On another note this game suffers from newbie-slaughter syndrome, as in newbie characters get killed for sport by players who have spent way too much time playing the game: I was killed within five minutes of getting out of the tutorial area. Also: The tutorial is badly designed: It actually explains what you should do but the text is barely readable and you might miss what exactly you’re suppose to do, and once you close that box explaining what to do you can’t get it back.
Content: The game seems to be mission based, but the retarded way the owner step up some of the skills I can’t be bothered to do any of the missions. The first mission is to find/kill Raditz, only the game doesn’t tell you anything about where Raditz is. Instead you have to use your “sense” skill, which involves scrolling through a huge list of every NPC/Player repeatedly and using it to find out if you’re going in the right direction. The fly skill is also incredibly f-king annoying; in that you can’t hold it down to go in a continuous line you have to keep pressing the button for every block you want to move. Most of the content is pretty typically of a BYOND DBZ game: Guilds, Zenni, stores that are probably useless, Dragonball hunting, etc.
Misc: Training is typical DBZ BYOND poo poo: boring grinding on training equipment. You have to do the boring walking snake way quest if you die that every single goddamn DBZ game on BYOND requires you to walk.
Visuals and Design:
Design: Tab and pop-up box based. Everything that requires some sort of input will result in a popup box, which in most cases is badly designed. Hard to read text, bad use of colors (which results in the hard to read text), lost of funny grammar mistakes and typos. Typical crappy tabbed interface, but it does it job. Most of the screen is taken up by white blank space, which will hurt your eyes after a while: It’s like staring at a light bulb. The actual playing screen is regulated to s small section in the corner: You would think with 4.0s new abilities people would take advantage of, and move the playing area to the center of the screen. The Photoshop graphics suck too; they look ugly, and out of place. This game’s whole presentation is just really bad, and annoying at times.
Graphics: All crap. He tries to mix and match ripped Legacy of Goku sprites, really shoddily I might add, with random rpgmaker maker graphics. The result is regurgitated barf - a game what’s visual style lacks any sort of consistency. This game is so tacky looking. The HUD (heads up display) uses like 3 different types of sprites, with different colors and styles: I mean come on! It’s not that difficult to make stuff the same color.
Community: I didn’t interact with them, but now that I played at a more reasonable time and not super late at night it’s safe to say most of them are idiots, and young children. They’re what you expect to be playing this sort of game, not to mention they’ll go out of their way to kill new players.
Final Score: 1/5 – The game is boring, and poorly put together.
Misc: The owner of this game is despicable. Not only does he have a subscribe button and links plastered all over the game; he even PUNISHES players for not subscribing. Case in point: I re-log and am smacked with a time limit to re-log back in, because I wasn’t a subscriber. I figured it was just a ranking thing so I decide to check it out: Turns out the guy is requesting quite a bit of money for ‘special’ access to content and features for subscribers in all of his games.
Here’s this guys pricing schemes, it will make spit your drink out through your nose:
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4 dollars for a 1 month sub ($4 per month)The prices are as follows:
18 dollars for a 6 month sub ($3 per month)
24 dollars for a 12 month sub ($2 per month)
100 dollars for a lifetime sub
And this is what people get in the game:
Bonuses you get in DBZHU:
Equipment Never Breaks
2 Extra stat points each level
Black Star DBs (10x Normal Wish Values)
can change character whenever and wherever
free player house (100,000,000 Zenie Value)
White Star DBs (100x Normal Wish Values, Once per day Only)""
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Talk about a huge advantage to people willing to pay the dough eh? I’m normally ok with people giving ranking benefits in games because it helps support BYOND, but this is just crap. There’s no excuse to be trying to make this much money off of a game in which %90 of you stole from Toei, Funimation, and Infogames. Also he claims the money goes towards good servers, Strange the game was incredibly laggy (and yes it was his server).