PlayStation All Stars: Battle Royale Review

Nintendo has had great success from their crossover fighting franchise, Super Smash Brothers. This title features everyone's favorite Nintendo characters doing battle in bouts of up to four opponents at a time. Now, Sony has decided to create their own game as such, and released PlayStation All Stars: Battle Royale. This game features your favorite characters from franchises like Killzone, Twisted Metal, Bioshock, InFamous, and many more, taking part im matches us gamers have only dreamed of before.This game provides seeming endless entertainment for you and your friends to take part in. The amazing cast of characters, dynamic maps, and diverse items always make the game interesting.

Don't knock over his ice cream.

The best part of this game is the cast. I really enjoyed battling my way through the PlayStation universe as Cole McGrath, Kratos, and Ratchet. Rivalries are formed between characters, such as Sly Cooper and Nathan Drake, or Parappa the Rapper and Ape Escape's Spike. The battles lead to a story that, though interesting, leaves to be desired. The best example of a story is Drake ending up with a few pages of the Thevius Racoonus, prompting Sly to take them back. The worst is Jak pulling a gun on Ratchet because Ratchet looked at him funny. Some of them are even comical, such as Kratos knocking over Sweet Tooth's ice cream cone.

Bioshock's Songbird firing at the plane from Uncharted 3

The maps in this game are fantastic, and adds new layers to the story. Sometimes you get to see Chop Chop Master Onion kick a Chimeran Goliath so hard that it collapses. Other times, your Uncharted 3 cargo plane will get shot down for flying too close to the sky city Columbia. It is worth it to play all of the maps just to see what happens next.

One of the games downfalls is the unbalanced characters. Some always land hits and gain AP incredibly quickly, while others are easily avoided and take awhile to level up. Some level 3 supers are difficult to use and don't guarantee kills, while others allow up to six and guarantee three. Another problem is the noncompetitive challenges to be played alone. The game lays out several difficult tasks that are too be completed whilst battling three opponents. The third difficulty I had was how characters tended to be unnecessarily aggressive to each other, such as Spike attacking Parappa for scaring away a monkey, but this was only a minor issue.

I would strongly recommend this game to anyone who likes their PlayStation exclusives, Smash brothers, or fighting games. Its better than any Smash Brothers game that I've played, and its something that's been a long time coming.

9.5/10