Over the weekend and running up until 7pm tonight (Tuesday, January 16), we took part in the open beta for Dragon Ball FighterZ and had our asses handed to us, but it was all very, very fun. Check out our impressions.

Releasing on PC, PS4 and Xbox One January 26, Dragon Ball FighterZ is not just a flashy, gorgeous fighting game recreation of the Dragon Ball anime series, it's already proving much, much more. Here's a snippet from our impressions:

I spent a lot of time in the Tutorial portion of the game -- an area you physically need to walk to with your cute Chibi DBZ avatar because the game’s ‘menu’ is basically a little 3D village. If you’ve played Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, it’s a lot like that, only Chibi in its own right. Within the ‘menu’ hub, there were five locked out areas, with the aforementioned Tutorial section, a Replay area, Versus and a Ranking area. The Tutorial, thankfully, is lengthy and eases you into the game’s actual complexity slowly enough that by the time you’re attempting to summon Shenron, you don’t realise just how far you’ve come.

Controls and attacks are more Street Fighter-like than any other fighting games, but there are specific DBZ mechanics that work super well and helps give the game its own flavour and strategy. The aforementioned summoning of Shenron, for example, requires seven Dragon Balls collected throughout a fight based on combo numbers and a few other variables. Once you’ve collected them, you just need to land a perfect X or Square Super (basically just hitting X or Square and landing enough consecutive hits to pull off the Super), and the famous dragon appears to give you an over-the-top hand -- you can revive an ally, restore your health, gain the ultimate power of even become immortal (for a limited time).

Click here for our full Dragon Ball FighterZ impressions.