And they said Super Smash Bros wouldn’t be shown at E3. FOOL! Get your head right. Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale IS Super Smash Bros. I’ve always said that if you’re going to copy something, copy the best and copy it blatantly. And with Nintendo busy spray painting Xbox 360 controllers all week, this could be the E3 of the copy cats.
We got a chance to go a few rounds in the ring with some other E3 attendees and for the most part, it’s pretty faithful to the source material. There are a bunch of characters from various Playstation games, each with moves that reflect their essence, the level design was pretty spot on (although I question why the hydra from God of War was in a Ratchet and Clank level), and events will happen in those levels that are clever references to other games. But it’s kind of like when your divorcee dad tries to make you your mom’s signature dish: all the ingredients are there, but something’s not quite right.
It seems like someone at SuperBot Entertainment went down a checklist and in the process, missed what makes Super Smash Bros engaging, which is the randomness and chaos. Playstation All-Stars is definitely chaotic, but it’s just not random. In Smash, your main objective is to knock your opponent off the screen. You would do that using a combination of normal attacks, smash attacks, special moves, and since Super Smash Bros Brawl, “Final Smash” attacks. Sometimes items drop in that you can use in creative and even downright skillful ways to gain an advantage. Even if you get knocked towards the edge of the screen, you can potentially cheat death via some slick combination of jumping and special moves. In All-Stars, you only score kills by hitting opponents with your super move, which is gained by hitting them with normal moves which fill a super meter. Getting hit with a super move is an instant death. Let me emphasize: there is no way to kill your enemies with normal or special attacks. The only purpose they serve is to fill your super meter.
The problem is that, like Super Smash Bros, the controls and attacks are relatively simple. That’s a good thing. It’s part of the appeal. The problem that I found early on is that because the controls are so simple, they’re very spam friendly. Again, that’s much like Smash Bros, but since the only way to score a kill is to hit someone with your super, you’re sub-consciously encouraged by the game to find the move that will fill your bar the fastest and use it repeatedly. The other problem is that once you do fill your bar and begin to perform your move, any damage done to you will knock you out of the animation and your super meter will return to zero. The game becomes this rinse and repeat process of fill your bar, use your super, fill your bar, use your super. That’s a far cry from the randomness of Smash that makes it great.
I should mention that the combat itself is pretty fun and flows pretty well, but it just feels utterly pointless, like a means to an end. The moral of the story is that if you’re going to copy something so blatantly, either copy it 100% or not at all. When you only make minor changes to the source material like SuperBot is making with Playstation All-Stars, you run the risk that the one thing you changed is what made the original great in the first place. It’s not due until Q3/Q4 2012 so there is still a possibility that SuperBot will figure it out and make the minor changes necessary to turn this from a cheap Smash knockoff into a Smash equal. Until then, the rest of us can just hope Dad figures out that all he needed was paprika the whole time.
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