PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royal

[size=+1]PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royal[/size]​

Uuhhh...Oh man, oh man, oh maaaann...

This is not a baaaad game. It just...it just has a heck of a lot to live up to. Even so, when one of my first thoughts is "Even I can build a better Smash Bros. clone!", you have issues.

For those that have never heard of this: this is what happened when Sony Interactive tried to steal a little of Nintendo's thunder and have their own Super Smash Brothers Crossover game.

Don't pretend like they didn't. It's practically on the box in big neon lights. Almost every fibre of the gameplay screams it, except for the bits they altered to avoid copyright violations.

The plot, which is here for some baffling reason, changes between each character but the threads are rather simple. There is some sort of energy that is protected by a giant purple crystal head that doesn't really resemble anything other than they thought they had to have they're own version of Master Hand as a final boss. The characters want it because shiny shiny. They fight each other for it. Then they use the energy for whatever they want.

That end goal for the ultimate power they just gained genuinely ranges from the continued conquest of the gods, to the acquisition of cake.

Yeah, that's Fat Princess for you, which as far as I can figure out is like a Capture the Flag type thing except your flag is a princess and you can make it harder to have her captured by making her more and more obese.

Wow...It's one of those moments where it's so silly and stupid, your not sure if you can get offended.​

Everything else is kinda just...there because fighting game.

While this game is by no means bad, I just think of it like how I feel about Soul Calibur and Mortal Kombat.

To me Soul Calibur is an excellent series. I've played a number of them and I've always found them far more accessible than the other 'One-On-One' fighters I've played. The controls are rather fluid and corispond to things that make some semblance of sense. It's battle system becomes very open and free by the fact that characters are able to move around each other as well as forwards and backwards. It feels like a real fight between two people with swords and your actions seem to settle into a decent analogue for that.

Mortal Kombat has never felt quite as natural to me. To me, it's combo moves are rather weird. Stringing a combo together is not only difficult but disconnected. Moves don't flow into other moves like a tree, such as in Soul Calibur. Instead, it feels like every new move performed needs completely arbitrary combinations before anything happens. It's not a bad approach, I simply prefer the smooth links that Soul Calibur offers.

You don't seem to learn combos so much as the routes through your character's move list you can take when and how. There's entire characters that are all about set up and pay off.

So, I get the same vibe here.

Smash Bros. at any point in the series has it's combat as tight, fast and free-flowing as possible. You have a standard combo but you also have all these different moves that are altered by pressing a direction. Linking moves is simple, even if they don't actually chain. They're generally so quick, you don't mind them acting as an independent move. But, the game is built around this, letting you rack up damage through the clever application of certain moves in different situations. It's like selecting a golf club before a swing.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royal (or, maybe, PSASBR) seems more set up to have each individual move chain into another move for extra damage. Combining individual moves is a bigger thing here than in Smash because the focus of the fight and it's metagame is different.

Smash is closer to a kind of wrestling. You weaken your opponent with your attacks before performing a larger, heavier move that will knock them out of the current stage and score you points needed to win. It's simple and offers plenty of open combat. You can try to go for those heavy moves early. Or you can play defensively and minimise the damage done. You can even think about how effective your character's moves are going to be to your opponent.

Like how Paluntena's move set suggests a strong defensive against almost any projectile based character. A good Paluntena character seems expected to stand her ground and swat projectiles around like it's a Legend of Zelda endgame boss fight.

Good ol' magical tennis!​

Battle is centred entirely around performing special moves. There are no health bars, no percentages denoting weakened enemies and no points scored for anything other than catching an opponent in a special move.

This is interesting but ultimately limiting. In my opinion...

Battle does most of what Smash does. Character's have lots of moves to deal damage. Some can be combined for combo attacks and some can be repeated for special combos too. While Smash only ever gave their characters a button for performing normal attacks and a button for performing special attacks, Battle gives it's characters two special attack buttons. One is for heavier attacking moves and one for some extra abilities and whatnot, possibly to make up for a lack of a 'Smash Move' equivalent.

You can smack several colours of snot out of anything in your way quite competently with these moves. Racking up damage is not exactly hard but we'll dive into that with more depth in a bit. The issue is how clunky linking one move to another feels. There's little fluidity here. It simply feels like they build some moves into the character and worked out combos from what they had given each character. Sure, some moves will knock a character into the air and another will hit them for more damage but it never gets any further than that in terms of complexity. Mainly because it simply can't. It makes the game feel like it has more depth than it actually does. It's a button masher, you just don't know it yet.

Issue Number Bloody 1 I have with this game is how you score points.

Every hit landed on your opponent garners you a percentage of a Special Meter. Fill the meter up and it'll display a nice, fat 1 next to it. This means you can now perform a Level 1 Special Move by hitting R2.

Special Moves are a little like Final Smashes in Smash, except the game is built around them rather than being an optional item that can tip the balance of the game in your favour if used correctly. Like all other items in that game.

Hitting opponents with Special Moves is the only way to score points and win. The issue is that every single special move is different. They all have different speeds, areas of effect, requirements, attached bonuses, that sort of thing.

This is acceptable in Smash as knowing how each Final Smash worked didn't cost you the game necessarily. And you only had one to worry about.

Stages aren't that interesting here either. They have things randomly pop in where they shouldn't. For example, Metropolis from Ratchet and Clank is attacked by a Hyrda from God of War. And I think a Bioshock Infinite blimp and some other things attack the Uncharted level. Lastly, Buzz hijacks the Little Big Planet level and makes you ask questions or it'll try to kill you. But the game rules render any hazards the levels have pretty boring as all of them don't cause damage, only make you loose energy. Or drop it on the floor were it can be picked up. So, they're not that devistating, in the long run as a few combos later, the penalty is recovered from.

Still, they're pretty...And accurate to the games. Apart from when one franchise smashes into another because the developers just wanted to be contrary to as many of Sakuri's decisions as possible, it seems.​

Battle has three per character as you can fill up your bar three times for an increasingly more powerful Special Move. The third, of course, being the most powerful and needing the least skill to pull off.

While a game based around building up meter by fighting opponents until you can finish them off with a Special Move doesn't sound too bad on paper, in practice it's kinda annoying. Opponents don't often stand still and these moves often assume that they will. Sure, they aim in roughly the right direction but they rarely allow for any sort of movement or aiming. Trying to actually nail the bastard with one of these attacks is the bane of a character.

Some character's moves are very situational and some will only work if you happen to wait around for an item. Some only seem to work if you corner them against a wall first. And yet, some seem horrible to avoid. Jak's Dark Bomb attack will hold players in place then smack them with a large area of effect. That's tough to get out of the way of, even if you have to get to Level 2 first.

And there's nothing else you can do. You have only one method of getting rid of an opponent.

In Smash, your options are open. You can rack up damage but what then? Risk charging up a smash attack? Hope a good throw will launch your target far enough? Wait for a nice, hefty item? Maybe a special move would finish them off? You have a pretty well rounded amount of possibilities, making for a fleshed out set of game mechanics and player possibilities.

Battle limits itself. Your avenues of attack are pretty bare. You have to rack up damage and use your meter. Or else you loose.

No chance of a straying to the side and letting the others beat each other up, leaving the rest for you. No chance of stray items making or breaking a match.

Your forced into the fray by virtue of needing the meter energy. That's not a brilliant thing when your enemies stay just as strong as they were at the start of the fight as they are now that they're aiming a rocket launcher at you.

I would argue the characters aren't that well set up either.

It feels like one of those fan versions of Smash that someone made in Adobe Flash. Like, they know that the moves are usually referential but they don't realise that move sets are altered to make sure they're effective but balanced.

Think of Mega Man's Top Spin. By all rights, that move should suck. But in Smash 4 it was upgraded to become a pretty devastating running attack. And a great deal of Peach and the StarFox characters have moves entirely made up for Smash, simply because there wasn't much to work with.

Battle has very different characters to attempt to do the same thing with. This is a game where Nathan Drake is supposed to exist in the same place as PaRappa the Rapper, for goodness sake. And yet, Nathan will always fire over RaRappa's head no matter what.

But, the focus now is on simply causing damage and finding ways of being efficient at that. So, how about we analyse one of the character's I played as all the way through the single player mode.

Jak, of the Jak games, is a pretty good choice for a game like this. We already know that he's very agile, pretty strong and the arsenal of weapons that he has amassed by the third game - of which this version seems to be based on - make him a pretty versatile fighter.

Plus, Jak has this whole 'Dark and Light' power thing going on that make him stupidly powerful compared to everyone else. Either he can be a Demigod of White or a Horned Demon of Rage. Both are awesome to play with in Jak 3 (especially with unlimited Eco Cheats turned on.)​

So, lots to play with.

Then why, oh why did they decide that Jak's only moves that are done by his hands and fists be the only four physical moves he's known for. I can understand the 1-to-1 translation of Jak's spin kick and punch to make it in but maybe as part of another combo?

As it stands, Jak will slam forwards into a punch then uppercut, followed by an air spin kick. And that's his standard '1, 2, 3' combo but only if your pushing left or right as you hammer the Square button. Just standing still will only spin kick, nothing else. This is a move that forces Jak to travel halfway across the arena like a bull at a gate then rocket up into the air, where he's vulnerable to almost every other character in the game without leaving the ground. And it's the most accessible and simple to perform moves he has. Might as well just paint a bullseye on him somewhere if he's not OK with that '1, 2, kick' thing Mario has been doing since Mario 64.

Yes, issue 2 with Jak's design is that he's not all that unique as most of what can apply to him and his weapons applies to almost everyone else here. The issue with the PlayStation character's on offer, is that they're variety it not all that fantastic. There seems to be a heavy bias towards character's from Shooters. Nathan Drake, some guy from Killzone, Cole McGrath from inFamous (which pretty much is a shooter, just indirectly), Issac from Dead Space, Sweet Tooth from Twitsted Metal, Ratchet and Clank; all of these guys will use guns or rockets. I mean, sure, you added in some sword fighters like Kratos or Metal Gear's Raiden as well as a few brawlers like Heihachi or Sly Cooper, but the guns in this game are still a better bet. They're range makes for a sounder bet because you don't have to be anywhere near a target to rack up meter energy.

In Smash, projectiles were a decent if flawed approach to the game. You can use them but most projectiles don't launch enemies. So, most of them are only good for weakening opponents. The only projectiles that can launch are hard to charge up or access as well as actually fire at your target. Your forced into finding some other way with what you have to actually land that killing blow. Usually, that means moving in to fight.

For characters in Battle, there is no such problem as you only need to hit an enemy with a Special Move to score. Usually, depending on which move your about to use, you can just rack up energy then fire without ever having to give up the distance you've put between your enemy. Sure, the arenas aren't so spacious that you can dance around each other the whole time without even trying. It's the fact that you can win by spamming moves, running away and then pushing a button that shows up the game's issues. All without having anyone come anywhere near a fight if you want.

What would have helped Jak? Well, maybe giving him less of his guns to work with. His Blaster Rifle, yes but not necessarily his Anti-Gravity Field gun. Or the Gun that shoots a little flying saucer that shoots as it goes. Or the Needle Laser thing. A move set that was built around only a few of his guns could have been more focused and easier to string together into something effective. Heck! Most of the weapon upgrades they give you were superfluous but fun even in the game they come from. It could also have helped if they'd came up with a decent '1, 2, 3' punch combo instead.

If only they had some example of a Gun-Focused Character in a fighting game that managed to keep the spirit of the source material but made the character balanced and interesting to play with against the other characters of the game. But where could you possibly find one of those?​

In fact, it does feel like they had plenty of ideas but not enough refinement. After all, they filled two special buttons with moves for on land and in the air.

Ratchet and Clank have a rocket launcher and disk launcher. Neither can be fired straight forwards.

Nathan Drake is able to summon a wall to hide behind and attack from. This masonry-based magic would have been great in his own games.

Cole MacGrath has ice powers too, even though he's supposed to be an electric superhero. That from the sequel?

I could go on and on about this. There's so much to nitpick. Even the selection of characters chosen is a little inadequate.

You see, Sony, unlike Nintendo, doesn't technically own many of the characters used in their games. So, when it came to doing something like this game, they likely had a small pool of names to choose from that didn't require hours and hours and hours of debates and meetings just to have appear. Copyright and whoever holds the rights to things probably dominated the thought processes behind who was chosen to join the game's roster.

The sad thing is, I think that Sony didn't want too much hassle unless this game was slated to be sold in the hundreds of millions, so didn't go too far to look for characters to add.

Even so, there's plenty that should be here, if we're going for the same spirit that Smash holds. Because the PlayStations have had a great deal of interesting, recognised characters on the platform that would be perfect for something like this.

It's Microsoft that I would be far more dubious of if they tried a game like Smash. It would likely just be Rare characters, Master Chief and Fable stuff. Hard to think of much else.

So, why not anything from Square Enix. By this I mean stuff like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. The Disney thing would be a little tricky if you went for Sora or Riku or any of the Organisation XIII, I getcha there, but come on! Leon, Cloud, Sepphiroth, Sipher, Wakka, Balthire, Captain Bashe, Ashe, Auron, Rikku, Payne. There were plenty of Final Fantasy characters on PlayStation consoles, why not beat Nintendo to it? They made a home with Sony after the Super Nintendo ran out of steam, why not show them a little love for it?

Just no Snow, OK?

How about characters from Katamari Damacy? Or more Tekken characters? I know there's plenty by now. Maybe extend things out to Soul Calibur or, oooo...I dunno...

THREE OF THE
MOST WELL KNOWN AND BELOVED
PLAYSTATION FRANCHISES IN
THE HISTORY OF THE CONSOLE​

There are three rather hefty and glaring omissions to the character roster here. And I'm sure you might have wondered where they were yourself. It baffles me that they would be so lazy as to ignore these three. Because, as a long standing fan of Playstation games, these three are what I would think of first over anything else.

One of them is Abe, from the Oddworld games. A dark and oppressive world where you play as a little weakling, looking to use only your wits and cunning to overcome the odds. Granted, Abe would be hard to put into a fighting game but if they can make Peach and Olimar powerful characters, they can manage something with Abe.

Be honest: How could you forget a face like that?​

Another is Spyro the Dragon. The first game was a landmark in how games like it where made for generations to come. Nothing else like it could have been made without the PlayStation exploding. They were fun, inventive and challenging. All three of the original games. Now, Spyro has been gobbled up by Activition and turned into just a side character in Skylanders these days but surely you can't celebrate PlayStation as a whole without him.

It's like a Nativity Play forgetting to have Jesus!​

Lastly, Crash Bandicoot! Come on, guys! I know Naughty Dog don't make those games any more but did you really not think to ask them for the old Crash characters as well as the bits for Uncharted? Crash was a breakout hit that put PlayStation on the map. You would have had lines around the block if you'd had him and N.Cortex as playable characters. I can't think of any excuse why not!

Hey Activision! Make another Crash Game! A good one this time! And properly! Not like that rush job Twinsanity got! That game was awesome. Well, the bits that were completed then stitched together to form...whatever that was, was awesome.​

Lest we forget Lara Croft or Rayman or Croc or every other game character that owes itself to this series of consoles. It baffles me that they're not in there but Sir Daniel of MediEvil is. Not even any love for Journey?! That game that was making headlines a while back with almost all the gaming press when it came out that happens to be PSN exclusive?!

Is that really the best you could find, Sony? MediEvil is fondly remembered but he's hardly my first choice. I think I've made my first choices rather clear. Were the rights just floating around in an attic somewhere and you stuck him in when you realised your character roster looked a bit bare?

I won't blame you if you go and Google who this guy is. I have to and I know who he is.​

And lastly, this game has paywalls. Four of the characters, only two of which I've heard of (Issac Clarke and Kat from Gravity Rush) are locked away, held for a small ransom for each one. Also, online multiplayer requires a special pass, which you need to pay to unlock.

While it's only because I got my copy for second hand, I still don't want to pay it. I don't like this game as much as Smash. Any of them is better than this. The same level of care and detail hasn't been given to this game.

And as such, it kinda sucks in comparison. It's had no where near the same level of love put into it. It feels too much like a cold experiment in marketting. There's touches of fun here and there but Smash is just that much more worth your time and money.

No, it's not bad, it's just doesn't even try to measure up. I can only hope any sequels are more worth my time than this.

Oh! The 'Not Master Hand' Spikey Head actually has some significance. This is Polygon Man, the original mascot for the Playstation when it was first released. Other characters replaced him. He's unknown outside of the US. He's the guy that fights you at the end of the 'Story' mode. It's kinda lame. You just fight more of the same characters you've been fighting so far except they're all purple and then smash the side of his head a bit. It's underwhelming.​