Note: Originally posted on November 1, 2012. Â Since the game has been out for quite a while, this post is basically useless but I wanted to put it up anyway.
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Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale is kind of an odd duckling in that it is a high profile game that takes clear inspirations from the Super Smash Bros series of games. Despite the high popularity of that series, there are few, if any, games that attempted to take advantage of the success of the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale is odd in that it is a bold attempt to take advantage of the success of that aforementioned series. The game is the work of developers SuperBot Entertainment and SCE Santa Monica Studios. It will be simultaneously released for the Playstation 3 and the Playstation Vita. I will be taking a look that the Public Beta that just took place for the game’s online mode.
I had an interesting experience with the beta. When I first played it, I really didn’t like it. I felt it was really unbalanced to me and the controls felt really loose. I also lost a lot of matches as I still was not quite used to the controls and mechanics of the game. It just felt like a waste of time. I was also aware that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. While some impressions of the game were positive, others were quite critical, criticizing what they felt as unbalanced gameplay. They complained that characters like Kratos and Radec had an unfair advantage over characters like Sly Cooper, Fat Princess, and PaRappa the Rapper. This is understandable considering that the former characters are more obvious mascot fighter candidates than the latter characters.
Special skills are moves that character can pull off once they have filled up a meter. There are three levels of the special skills meter. You fill up the special skills meter by damaging the other players or collecting them from boxes that randomly appear during matches. The special skills can go from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3. The higher the level, the more powerful and flashy the special attack. These special attacks are how you kills your opponents in the game.
However, while I did really enjoy the beta, there are still flaws that, while forgivable, are still worth noting. One thing is that during matches, you can use items that are temporarily gained from boxes randomly dropped in the match. While these items can be useful, I never really felt the need to use them for the most part. Another issue is that it is easy to lose track of where your character is during the match. Due to the fact that the character models can blend together, this can makes things confusing at times.
There were also times where the character you end up playing as will be different from the character you choose in the character selection screen. While it is rare enough that it does not ruin the game, it is still a noticeable flaw that will hopefully be ironed out for the full version of the game. There are also times, where during a match, connection is lost and the match abruptly ends mid-fight. Again, not a big enough flaw to ruin the game but one that will hopefully be ironed out.
I have also heard some complain that the “mix two games together into one level†thing leaves the stages lacking an identity, I personally was not bothered by this. I found the mixing of two games to be unobtrusive and well done enough that the effect is better than it has any right being.
While I can say that there are similarities to the Super Smash Bros series of games, I don’t think people should just write it off as a clone as from what I played of the beta, the game is a lot of fun on its own merits. While there are minor issues that will most likely be ironed out by the time the full game is released. This is just a small sample of what the game is going to have considering the beta only had online matches with six characters. If this beta is to believe, I think that Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale will be a pleasant surprise, even for those who are shrugging it off now.
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