PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Review

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Who doesn’t love a crossover in video games? Imagine taking the best characters from the most popular franchises and pitting them against each other in a battle royale filled with weapons and power-ups? Oh, wait does that sound familiar? Nintendo did it already? Well, in 2012 SuperBot Entertainment, Bluepoint Games, and Sony Computer Entertainment teamed up and released PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale for the PlayStation 3. It’s one wild ride in this PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Review!

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Plot:

Everyone loves power and those who have it can never get enough! In the PlayStation universe, an unknown entity is gathering the most powerful video game characters that have stepped foot onto PlayStation systems. Numerous characters make their way through the landscapes of games fighting each other in search of this entity that has called to them. As it turns out, this entity is PlayStation’s original mascot, “Polygon Man”! He attacks them seeking their powers but when the player defeats them they can absorb his power and continue back to their own games.

Who are these characters from beloved PlayStation franchises? Let’s look at the roster.

Big Daddy – BioShock
Cole MacGrath (both evil and good forms) – Infamous
Colonel Radec – Killzone
Dante – Devil May Cry
Fat Princess – Fat Princess
Heihachi Mishima – Tekken
Jak and Daxter – Jak and Daxter
Kratos – God of War
Nariko – Heavenly Sword
Nathan Drake – Uncharted
PaRappa – PaRappa the Rapper
Raiden – Metal Gear Solid
Ratchet and Clank – Ratchet and Clank
Sackboy – Little Big Planet
Sir Daniel Fortesque – MediEvil
Sly Cooper – Sly Cooper
Spike – Ape Escape
Sweet Tooth – Twisted Metal
Toro Inoue – Doko Demo Issyo

That’s a decent lineup of playable characters and if you get the DLC you can select Emmett Graves from Starhawk, Isaac Clarke from Dead Space, Kat and Dusty from Gravity Rush, and Zeus from God of War. There are some notable characters absent for various reasons but I really wish they would have included Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Solid Snake, Nemesis, and Gabe Logan. Everyone will have their wishlist, that’s just mine for my PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Gameplay:

In PlayStation All-Stars, you’ll fight against multiple opponents on your way to Polygon Man. The stages are levels from famous PlayStation franchises and transform halfway through the fights. Each character has a rival that you’ll fight before Polygon Man, but the rivalries don’t mean anything or add to the already weak story.

It makes sense that Kratos is on the front cover, he is by far the strongest character from my PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review. Kratos, Raiden, and Cole MacGrath dominate while Toro, Sackboy, and PaRappa are almost useless. I know Playstation All-Stars didn’t want to completely copy Smash Bros. and they tried to be different. In a few ways, they succeeded. Instead of being able to force your enemy off-screen or knock them off a ledge, it’s impossible to knock anyone off ledges in most levels. I believe there are two where it’s possible but it was extremely rare during my PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review. That took a lot of the fun out of the gameplay right away. Instead of sending your friends flying, you now must destroy them. You do that by fighting in combat and earning up points that charge your meter. The meter has three levels and once it reaches any of them, you can try and land a “kill move”. Obviously, the level one kill move is weaker than a level three kill move so I usually try and wait for a level two or three kills. The cool thing is each character has three separate and unique kill moves that tailor to their personality. I enjoyed the concept of the game. A level three attack will target almost all opponents on the screen so you can get three kills immediately which is usually needed to win the match. A level one kill attacks one opponent, and a level two is somewhere in between.

Another annoyance I had during my PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review was the cut scenes. You have a unique cast of characters that are full of personality and it would have been awesome to watch them interact with each other or quip jokes. I’m a big sucker for storylines and cut scenes and this game had almost zero. Each time a “cut scene” happened it was a drawing with the character voicing over his lines. It looked cheap. It did not “wow” me in any sort of way.

If you don’t know what you are doing, good luck. My friends and I would play this with different characters to try and figure out who fought well against who, but in the end, it just didn’t keep our attention. I need some type of story, I need cut scenes if all I’m doing is fighting random characters.

With such a big release that would rival Super Smash Bros. I thought PlayStation would put more effort into it. More characters, bigger levels, the game felt rushed to get developed. In the future, if they create a PlayStation All-Stars 2 I hope that they take the time to get things right. This game and concept have major potential, but it didn’t nail it the first time during my PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review.

Memories:
I asked for this game when I was in college for Christmas one year. I received it and was stoked to play it because I loved Super Smash Bros and figured it’d play similarly but with video game characters from my beloved PlayStation franchises. After about a week of playing it, I grew bored. I beat the game with every character but you aren’t rewarded much if anything for your victory. You can’t unlock any characters but there’s not really a story so this is just for arcade fun.

Every now and then, I’ll pull this game out when my friends come over and we’ll play it. The friends I play with really suck at it but it’s fun to watch my wife beat them.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Review Score:

If you are going to copy an idea, you better make yours better than the original. Unfortunately, Sony didn’t live up to the Nintendo stamp for crossover battle royales. Missing characters and lack of quality cut scenes make this a game to bring out only when you have company that needs to be entertained for a half hour. It’s not surprising this hasn’t seen a sequel. If they ever do produce one I hope they get it right because this could be a ton of fun.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale scores a 6.8 out of 10.

What would you write for your PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale review? Do you remember when PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale first came out? What did you think of the character roster? Who did you play as and did you have issues beating Polygon Man? Let me know your memories and thoughts, I’d love to read the comments!