Supers Smashed: The Problem With PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

It would be foolish to dance around PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale’s extreme similarity to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series; it’s an almost identical concept – a four player fighting game featuring various popular PlayStation characters and environments, with a heavy focus on multiplayer.

Even in name, PlayStation All-Stars bears some resemblance to the first instalment of Nintendo’s popular fighting series, known in Japan as Nintendo All-Star! Great Melee Smash Brothers. Sony, too, know that this game thrives, exists even, due to the popularity of Smash Bros. – tagging their PS All-Stars E3 trailer with “super smash brothers” and “SSBB”.

Thankfully, All-Stars is much more than a cheap knock-off; it’s a brilliantly fun, fast-paced fighting game with some of its own tricks, deviating from Nintendo’s well known and well loved formula, hidden up its sleeves.

[videoyoutube]Fans of Smash Bros. should feel right at home with the controls, since SuperBot haven’t mixed it up too much. While X is used for jumping, the other three face buttons, in conjunction with a direction on the left stick, unleash various attacks: square is generally used for lighter, close-range attacks; triangle attacks are often powerful special attacks, harnessing suitable items from each character’s inventory; whilst pressing circle will unleash a variety of additional ranged and defensive attacks. Blocking, taunting and throwing also play a part in All-Stars’ impressively varied control scheme.

It does feel somewhat weightier than the springy Smash Bros. – none of the characters can reach the top of the screen by jumping, so it takes some time to get used to the heavy feel of the game, even with lighter characters. There’s no danger of falling off the side of a level in PS All-Stars, however, so the lighter and higher jumps aren’t as necessary.

And that’s exactly where All-Stars falls short.

All of the excitement from recovering from attacks, all of those dodges so you aren’t thrown off to the side or up into the sky, all of those hard-hitting attacks to smash players out of the ring are gone, replaced with a new common goal for the players: to build up their power meter by attacking each other. This power meter has three levels, which in turn activate three different Super moves for each character.

Supers are the only way to get kills, with each level being more devastating and more likely to kill multiple players. Not that you can’t kill three players with a first level Super, however; Kratos, for example, swings the Blade of Olympus for his first Super, which can kill all three players – or none at all – depending on the positioning. The second and third levels of Kratos’ Super moves up the ante, firing a tornado and turning him into the devastating, giant God of War respectively, with each wreaking more havoc and getting more kills than the last.

The Super system certainly works, adding a different dynamic to the game as players chase orbs to push their power meter up, but it completely removes the danger of being attacked. Your character’s power meter might go down, the attacking player’s will go up and you might even be thrown over the screen, but you won’t die from being hit with a normal attack – you’ll even stop at an invisible wall if you go too far off the side. There’s little danger in being attacked and it soon becomes a building up your power meter game rather than a fighting game.

Smash Bros. works with percentages: the higher the percentage, the more likely you are to fly off the screen and die from a powerful hit. Smash Bros. knockout system works and Super-like attacks play a secondary role, so it’s bizarre that the one biggest change SuperBot have made is with the one core mechanic of the game – knocking out other players.

[drop]Stages in PlayStation All-Stars are brilliant, however, as not only do they offer dynamic environments from PlayStation games, they bring elements from two (or more) games together. It’s incredibly fun to take part in a round of Buzz!, answering a PlayStation-specific question whilst a LittleBigPlanet level makes itself in front of your eyes, or to see Captain Qwark run away from the deadly Hydra from God of War, with the music changing to suit the new mood.

Various items such as Resistance’s hedgehog grenade or God of War’s Hermes Boots also appear occasionally, adding yet another way to defeat other players build up your Super meter.

Unfortunately, one item All-Stars will never have is the Pokéball, a favourite from Smash Bros.

SuperBot have taken time with each character’s moveset to make sure it stays true to each game and with that, they’ve succeeded. Whilst Kratos might have an arsenal of weapons to use, his blades work much like they do in God of War – pressing square, square and then triangle will even do the same move, with further variations and other attacks by pressing a direction on the left stick.

Despite the success of the movesets, the game (which is still in beta stage so it’s understandable for now) has some serious balance issues. SuperBot are going to have to spend a lot of time from now until release tweaking each character’s moves so that there’s no cheap attacks – something that may prove a challenge.

Unless SuperBot has done something really smart with the full game, the Super and knockout system will forever curse PlayStation All-Stars. Yes, there’s fighting and, yes, it’s fun, but it’s ultimately not the fighting – not the skill – that wins the game; fighting in All-Stars feels like hitting a punch bag, even with your mightiest of attacks, only to squash them like a bug with a tap of the R2 button. And there’s nothing super about that whatsoever.