PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale PS VITA

To say that Playstation All-stars Battle Royale was released to a lot of skepticism is an understatement, it takes a lot from the Smash Bros series, the 2D fighter with a lot of its systems greatest icons duking it out, yeah not exactly original but to simply write it off as a cheap clone is rather unfair......slightly, its still a clone but its a fun game too.

Like Smash Bros it allows you to create a dream match against some of the Playstation's stars of the past and present, its the games main hook and the inclusion of some 3rd party characters is rather cool too, indeed some characters are missing, Crash, Spyro, Lara, Cloud are all absent for whatever reason but you still get Heihachi, Nathan Drake, Sly and Jak among others. The cast is a case of having your cake and eating it, you get 20 characters (not counting DLC) which does seem like a low number however you'll also question which ones you could consider All-stars, is Fat Princess someone you'd call an all-star? What about Radec? Or even Nariko? They even don't include the PS2 Dante, we get the newer DmC Dante which goes against the All-stars bit in the title, in a way marketing kinda hurt this title.

Gameplay is like Smash Bros as up to 4 players battle but it does have a few unique features, first off the competitors don't have a life bar, rather when you attack an opponent you gain orbs that fills up a gauge that allows you to use a super move which is the only way, apart from a certain item, to kill enemies, its a cool gimmick that invites a risk vs reward system into the mix, should you use a level 1 super to take out 1 enemy or wait till you get a level 3 and take them all out.....if you think you can get it time, it adds a lot of depth to a combat system that doesn't offer much to it, some may say its distracting as you are more focused on the super meter rather than the actual fight but to me it gives its own kind of style.

Modes include practice, training and mission but none are done very well apart from online mode which should be the reason for you buying this game. Story mode is lackluster, you get a cutscene before and after showing why the characters are in this game but mostly it follows a I sense power, I must find power story for every character, its rather bland and the beginning & end cutscenes are just poorly designed pictures, the only cool thing about the story mode is the rival scenes, one character will interact with another character before a fight begins, Ill admit that my fanboy screamed during these events and I really do wish they had a cutscene like this after every fight, seeing characters team up and break alliances would have made story mode 1000 times better but sadly its just lazy for the most part, the only thing I really like about this game are the stage which mixes up areas from certain games, remember the plane from Uncharted 3? well that thing heads into Bioshock Infinite's Columbia as the songbird attacks you. Alden's tower from Infamous gets a visit from a trigger happy Carmelita Fox from the Sly series, even LocoRoco gets attacked by a Metal Gear Ray, the levels are pretty standard by themselves but when you see all the stages getting mixed with each other it brings a lot of personality to the game, its pure fanservice but thats the point and it works well.

Theres a lot of problems with All-stars and with what I have said it doesn't seem that great, mostly a fanservice game thats a ripoff of Smash Bros but the best thing about this game is how much fun this title is, I honestly didn't expect myself to enjoy this game as much as I did but the amount of hours I put into this surprised me and to me this is what you should buy PSASBR for, for me this is a must buy.

The game feels excatly like its console counterpart imo. Their are slight graphical differences but honestly its almost the same, I'de recommend this game, its alot of fun.