Playstation All-Stars is a four-player fighting game taking obvious inspiration from Super Smash Bros., creating a more friendly, party atmosphere than serious fighters like Street Fighter 4 or Tekken do. Just like its inspiration it plays out on a 2D plane, has simple inputs for pulling off attacks, takes place in zany arenas rife with environmental hazards, and throws random items at the combatants to spice things up. But don't be fooled: PS All-Stars plays a great deal differently from Smash Bros. It has its own unique gameplay, making it more strategic and therefor less accessible. Regardless, it's very fun.
Smash Bros. has players wailing on their opponents to kick them off of the screen. KO is the name of the game. It works a lot differently in PS All-Stars. There are no health bars in PS All-Stars like it may seem so at first, but each player has an AP bar. Successfully attacking your opponents fills up your AP bar, and sometimes taking damage yourself subtracts from your bar. Once you fill the bar once, you can do a level one super, and once you do it twice, you can do a level two super, and the same for three times for a level three. Using these powerful and stylish attacks, which are a lot like special attacks in standard fighters like Street Fighter or smash attacks in Brawl, is the only way to kill your opponents.
This makes the game very strategic. If you fail to use your super attacks effectively, which get progressively more deadly from level one to two to three, you will lose. If you wait to build up a level three super and you don't manage to get any kills, you more or less lost yourself the entire match; perhaps without any kills. I absolutely love it. Matches are tense, and its very reliant on skill without ever feeling overwhelming. Learning this game and its characters and its stages is invigorating, as it gives me the illusion that I'm playing Smash Bros. again for the first time, but with playstation characters. What makes this faux-first-time even more entertaining is the very smooth online play, HD visuals, and the option to continue your progress on the go on the Vita, allowing this game to do things that Smash Bros. has never done before.
It is upsetting that it's not as widely as appealing as Smash Bros. PS All-Stars most likely won't appeal to the more casual crowd, and it will most likely be too complex for folks like young children. Smash Bros. is simple and easy to understand at its core, but it has hidden depth, while PS All-Stars is exactly what it seems like on the surface: It's strategic and a bit complex.
It's clear that Developer Superbot Entertainment is passionate about this game, and truly has a love for the Playstation brand. The team was able to capture the essence of all of the initial characters thrown on the disc. Fans of each character's respective game series will likely enjoy that character's move lists, animations, sound bites and story bits in the Arcade mode. I'm a big Sly Cooper fan, and I can definitely say that it made me feel good inside to see Sly hop in his sneaky TNT barrel, glide in his paraglider, and team up with Bentley and Murray to defend the Thievius Raccoonus from the thief known only as Nathan Drake. Superbot does equally cool stuff for the rest of the roster and it's fantastic. Superbot gets it.
Each character has his own arcade mode to play through, following a quirky and entertaining story that pits them against another playstation character, but unfortunately, two of the three included cutscenes for each characters' playthrough are simply compilations of still images. Each character also has a set of around 20 challenges to complete, but none of them are unique to that character. There aren't many stages, there's no survival mode or something similar, and the menus look bland. Some aspects of PS All-Stars come off as lazy, which makes me feel as though Sony may have rushed this game out. Hopefully frequent and reasonably-priced DLC can keep this game alive for a long time.
There are a plentiful amount of characters on the disc, though. The graphics are colorful, crisp and interesting. The voice acting is not phoned-in and done by quality talents. The original music is thumping and convivial, and the rest are good picks from various Playstation games. The presentation is not all bad.
Overall, Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale is a great game. It's not as accessible as Smash Bros. has proven to be, its not as charming as Smash Bros. irrevocably is, it's not as feature-rich as Smash Bros. games tend to be, but it's a great game. Superbot understands how to make Playstation fans feel good inside, and they managed to make the game unique in its own right. Its gameplay is tense and strategic; both perhaps arguably more so than its inspiration. Playstation All-Stars made me feel like I was playing a Smash Bros. game for the first time again, and it manages to be HD, capably-online, and portable first.
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