An All-Star Brawl – Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale Review

I am trying hard not just say that Superbot’s Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale is a clone of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. It would be just an easy cop out for a review. I won’t deny it though, there is a lot of similarities to the popular brawler, the obvious one being a 4 player beat’em up game staring some of the companies biggest mascots.

The thing is, there is more to Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale than a Smash Bros. clone.

PSAS:BR is focused on 4 player brawls, selecting characters from a mixmatch of some of Sony’s big names, and other characters who just seem fitting for the brand (Dante from DMC originally was under a Playstation Exclusive, Raiden from Metal Gear Rising was of course originally the star Metal Gear Solid 2, and while Bioshock was originally a Xbox 360 exclusive, some Playstation fanboys would say that it had the definitive version… Their words, not mine.) The roster fits about 20 unique characters.

Each of the characters are given a series of moves based on what they do in their respective games. Nathan Drake, Radec and Ratchet all focus on range type weapons; while the Big Daddy, Dante and Kratos are close range focused. They’re given different moves and abilites depending on their style of strikes (light, medium, hard and grapples.) Depending on their direction can make it a launch knockdown or combo, but of course this is nothing new for the fighting game genre.

What is new and different though is the how points are counted. Fighting games in general focus on beating your opponent until his health bar is gone while increasing your super meter to pull off the super crazy move. Well PSAS:BR does not have a health bar, or a launch bar similar to Super Smash Bros. It just has the super meter which can be used at the touch of a button to blast away opponents, for every character hit by the super attack it counts to a point on your character.

You can have up to 3 tiers for the super attack, each delivering a different amount of range and damage. Tier 1 for example is good for taking on person, while tier two can take out multiples, the ultra tier 3 are the most powerful and can take out opponents multiple times due to duration of the attack.

Now there is some problems with this system, the big one is that there is no punishment for getting hit rather other then assisting the fuel up of your opponents bar, it would be better if there were punishments like stunning your opponent or slowing down their movements. The other problem is with the super attacks, as they do take some time to fill up, this means when you attack and miss, you wasted a whole lot of time.

The more impressive part of the game is the arenas, every level is a mash up of two games. Some are imaginitive, like the Hades level where the Patapons invade, the LocoRoco garden where Metal Gear Ray rips up the background, or the Uncharted 3 plane crash that flies into Bioshock Infinite’s Columbia. Every level has a new sense of danger which adds to your strategy of wailing on your opponents.

Aside from the gameplay, a big focus on PSAS:BR is online play. Playing more of the game increases your ranking unlocking more for the characters, including mascots, GamerTag badges, victory music and animations. You can unlock this by playing the great online system (which allows cross-play between the PS3 and Vita versions.) Or by playing the Arcade mode which features a full story mode of the characters being summoned to another dimension to gain ultimate power, which is gained by beating randomly chosen opponents and a rival (which usually follows an interesting cutscene.)

Playstation All-Stars is not the definitive fighting game, nor were we really expecting it to be. It borrows ideas that other games had done before, let alone better, but it is still fun for those moments when you just want to beat up a group of your friends. It’s a great way of advertising the different brands that Sony owns, and in general it’s a good time. I would recommend to try before you buy.