PAX 2012
Now earlier on I mentioned opponents (plural), didn’t I? Well as you progress through fights, you’ll find yourself battling one, two, sometimes three enemies at once. It all becomes one huge free for all, and you’ve got to be the victor. That’s a great idea right? Why fight one guy when you can battle three? Well, I’ll tell you why. A lot of the time during the more hectic fights, I found myself flicking my eyes around the screen trying to find where my character was after an explosive scene. A lot of the time, I found him in the top corner of the screen somewhere getting beaten to a pulp while I was rendered useless by my ignorance.
PAX 2012
The controls are pretty basic. You can use the left analogue stick to move, X to jump, and triangle, square or circle for different types of attacks. Mixing a direction on the analogue stick and one of the attack buttons will cause some variation in your character’s moves. Holding down L1 allows you to block attacks your enemies make, and holding L1 + flicking the analogue stick left or right will allow you to dodge. As you land successful attacks on your foes, your AP gauge will increase. The AP gauge has three levels of strength. As you reach each level, you’re able to release an attack more powerful than the last.
Each character has different attacks that reflect their background. For example, while I was fighting against Jak and Daxter, I noticed that Jak was pulling out some of the guns that we’ve seen in his native titles. When I found myself in a battle with Kratos (
God of War), his attacks were based around his two blades.
PAX 2012
There were a few occasions when I found myself trying to string together a combo to quickly fill my AP gauge, and some of my attacks simply didn’t hit. As you can imagine, this can be highly frustrating and can lead to you taking damage while recovering from the missed attack.
In some fights, weapons and other enhancements will occasionally appear in the arena. Sometimes you’ll break a box and find an item in it, other times the items will just appear somewhere on the playing field. These weapons and enhancements vary – anything from a rocket launcher to a giant hammer, or even a pair of rocket boots to increase your character’s speed. Sometimes when you hit with these weapons, small orbs will fall on the battleground. Collecting these orbs will contribute to filling up your AP bar.
PAX 2012
In multiplayer mode, I found the menus to be quite confusing and it wasn’t immediately clear how to edit the game settings. After finally figuring that out, I noticed that there was no way to define how many characters you want to fight in a round. It turns out that you can only have battles equivalent to the amount of players on your console (for a local game) - there wasn’t an option to add in any AI players, so in this case it was simple 1 vs 1 fights. The online multiplayer is very much the same as local, except it defaults to four players in each game.
If you’re the kind of gamer that’s up for a few beers in the front room with a couple of your pals on a Friday night, then
PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale is probably going to suit you well. It’s a good laugh and can be played casually. If you’re more of a serious gamer, the cons will probably outweigh the pros. Although it is a very fun game, it’s also very frustrating at times and doesn’t quite feel complete - shallow, if you will.
Pros:
+ Nice variety of playable characters
+ Multiplayer has the potential to be a lot of fun
Cons:
- Sometimes unresponsive combat system
- Fights get very repetitive after a while
- Can’t add AI in local multiplayer
- Easy to confuse which character is yours
SPOnG Score: 7/10
