This is a cross-over fighting game made by SuperBot Entertainment and SCE Santa Monica Studio exclusively for the PS3. Big surprise right? While for most games I’d suggest you skip past the opening sequence and hurry to the actual game play I highly recommend you take the extra minute or two to sit there and watch the first few scenes for this game. Between the video montage of all the characters showing what they’re made of and the awesome music that compliments it so perfectly. You’ll walk away from the opening feeling ten times more excited to play.
The game itself, while fun and entertaining, isn’t really anything special. Like most fighting games, you have your standard tutorials, practice mode, arcade mode, offline versus mode, and online tournament mode complete with its very own ranking system that takes the form of martial arts belts. Now any real gamer who has seen game play or played the game immediately makes connections to a well-known and similarly styled game that goes by the name of Super Smash Bros and let me just tell you, they’re right to do so. "If it’s so similar to Super Smash Bros, why should I waste my money on it?" Well I’m glad you asked, the answer is really quite simple. You get to play with all your favorite PlayStation characters, ranging from the less known, at least in my opinion, like Parappa the Rapper to world-wide favorites like the god of war, Kratos, plus two new characters that were released with the new DLC for the game: Kat from Gravity Rush and Emmet Graves from Starhawk. That small fact alone makes this game worth the money if you ask me. Not to mention the nicely constructed maps, made from the universe of each character’s game, that are filled with various hazards that can help or hurt you. There are however a few differences, some not so great.
Most fighting games you’re usually in a race to knock as many characters out of the field as possible, or lower down their health to 0 in order to achieve victory. In PlayStation All-Stars however, you’re competing with up to three other plays to gain as much power as possible to level up your special attacks which are then used to kill your enemy and either give you a point, if it’s a time match, or lower their amount of lives in a stock match. There are three levels of special attacks. The first one is usually pretty basic and you can be knocked out of it easily if you’re not careful. The second special is a bit harder to maneuver around and most times you can’t cancel it out, but it’s not impossible to get away from. The third and final special is usually either one massive attack that wipes out all the characters at once, or it’s an overpowered form of your character that makes escape futile and allows you to get 4-7 kills easily
So I’ve talked about the positives, let’s get into the negatives. Unfortunately, while you’re kicking ass you may realize that it’s hard to keep track of all that’s going on which could be because of all the flashing lights from the attacks, but it’s more likely to be the camera angles. The camera zooms in and out not only at unreasonable speed, but it can zoom out so far that you see the entire map, even when you and your opponents are generally in the same area. Once you get past that you may also realize that some characters are completely unbalanced and bring new meaning to the word cheap. Now those two can be accepted because that’s just how the game is, you accept and adapt accordingly. What isn’t so easy to accept is the horrible connectivity issues in online matches. Every two to three games the entire match will make the players either lag uncontrollably for a few moments, or it’ll just kick everyone in the game leaving some very frustrated players in the aftermath.
All that being said, I give PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale a "consider buying used" because the game may have a great opening sequence, a good character line up and fun, although familiar, game play, but the terrible camera angles and connectivity issues are two problems that just can’t seem to stop rearing their ugly heads.
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was developed by SuperBot Entertainment and SCE Santa Monica studios and published by Sony Computer Entertainment on November 20th, 2012 for the PS3 and PSVita. A copy of this game was purchased by myself for review purposes.
