PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a pretty interesting game. Despite looking like a shameless Super Smash Bros. copy on the surface, digging deeper reveals a complex combo-based game with a surprisingly large amount of love put into it. While the devs couldn't get established Sony icons like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon (which I can't exactly fault them for considering the game's lack of budget and them being a new studio at the time) and some characters like Emmett Graves, Raiden, Big Daddy and the ever-popular Donte feeling like they're mostly there to advertise upcoming games, every character has a really well designed moveset which feels like they're ripped straight from their respective series: Kratos has a huge array of blade combos, Ratchet uses a lot of guns and other weapons, both Coles fight really differently to reflect their different alignments and so on; every single character also has multiple costumes and a wide selection of intros, outros, taunts and victory music to choose from. I dare say there's more love put into each character here than Smash puts into their own (Falcondorf, anyone?). The stages are pretty well designed too, with each one featuring two different universes meshed together in one way or another, and it's a pretty cool concept all around.
Unfortunately, it's not all great. There aren't many modes to choose from, the roster's pretty small at 24, even compared to the 26 characters Melee had (never mind Brawl's roster having almost 40), and the game's pretty dang unbalanced with some characters like Kratos, Kat and Raiden completely ruling the meta with their OP tools, never mind the fundamentally-flawed Super system which basically homogenizes the entire game into hitting easily missable moves (a health system would've worked way better in my opinion), so while I can admire the love put into what they had and love the entire concept of "Playstation characters beat the crap out of each other", the gameplay in general kind of misses the mark. If we ever get a sequel, I'd love to see what new characters we'd get (Crash, Spyro and Spider-Man pls), and I hope they can refine the gameplay from the unsteady foundations this game left. Here's hoping for a PS5 sequel.
Kind of flawed, has potential, deserves a sequel.
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a pretty interesting game. Despite looking like a shameless Super Smash Bros. copy on the surface, digging deeper reveals a complex combo-based game with a surprisingly large amount of love put into it. While the devs couldn't get established Sony icons like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon (which I can't exactly fault them for considering the game's lack of budget and them being a new studio at the time) and some characters like Emmett Graves, Raiden, Big Daddy and the ever-popular Donte feeling like they're mostly there to advertise upcoming games, every character has a really well designed moveset which feels like they're ripped straight from their respective series: Kratos has a huge array of blade combos, Ratchet uses a lot of guns and other weapons, both Coles fight really differently to reflect their different alignments and so on; every single character also has multiple costumes and a wide selection of intros, outros, taunts and victory music to choose from. I dare say there's more love put into each character here than Smash puts into their own (Falcondorf, anyone?). The stages are pretty well designed too, with each one featuring two different universes meshed together in one way or another, and it's a pretty cool concept all around.
Unfortunately, it's not all great. There aren't many modes to choose from, the roster's pretty small at 24, even compared to the 26 characters Melee had (never mind Brawl's roster having almost 40), and the game's pretty dang unbalanced with some characters like Kratos, Kat and Raiden completely ruling the meta with their OP tools, never mind the fundamentally-flawed Super system which basically homogenizes the entire game into hitting easily missable moves (a health system would've worked way better in my opinion), so while I can admire the love put into what they had and love the entire concept of "Playstation characters beat the crap out of each other", the gameplay in general kind of misses the mark. If we ever get a sequel, I'd love to see what new characters we'd get (Crash, Spyro and Spider-Man pls), and I hope they can refine the gameplay from the unsteady foundations this game left. Here's hoping for a PS5 sequel.