AC9: Video Game Review: PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3 and PS Vita)

It's become very clear that Sony want to give something back to their long term fans after having a successful(ish) 20 years in the gaming business (may have got that estimate wrong so I apologise if I have), and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, is that something. It may look like a Smash Bros rip off, but there might be more to it than that. So without further ado, let's review it:

Note: this review is going to be a little bit different to my usual video game reviews so be aware of that. Also I'm only reviewing this now because I only got it a few days ago and haven't managed to get a chance to review it until now, so yeah. I know it sounds wrong for me to review a game that I put on my top 10 list beforehand and this will only be a one off. It won't happen again.

Characters

There's a good set of characters here that round up to 22 total (including all 2 in 1 characters and DLC ones too). A lot of the characters are from some of Sony's more recent franchises with a few from the past. Some of the characters that have been around for a while, are seen in their more recent forms which although drew a lot of controversy from fans, the developers believed that the long time fans should at least give them a try. There are a lot of characters that were missed out either because the developers couldn't get them in for various reasons, or because of something else, but the majority of them are a mix of first and third party characters. Like with Smash Bros, each one has their own unique attacks which surprisingly are very easy to do (unlike most fighting games). They all have a power meter which can go up to 3 levels that give them a chance to unleash a powerful attack that knocks each character in their way, out of the stage. Depending on what rules of the fight are, the player must either have the most KOs before the time runs out, or have done a specific number of KOs to win. Each character has their own different storylines that take place outside of their mainstream storylines which all end up having them battle all known fighters and then fight their carefully selected rival (Jak and Daxter VS Ratchet and Clank for example) and then battle Polygon Man, who was originally Sony's mascot before the launch of the PS1, and his minions. The storylines would then end with each character acquiring Polygon Man's unlimited power and returning to their normal lives. Overall, the character selection is good, however I feel that they should've put more in from each of the games instead of just the one character and also, there are a lot of Third Party characters which is OK, but could be better. 9/10

Stages

The stages are all based on a particular game, with elements from another game, which makes the whole crossover thing that this game is, a reality (unlike Smash Bros). To begin with, the stage starts off with it just being based on one game, and as the battle goes on, elements of anther game, slowly emerge in the background (An example of one is Stowaways where the battle begins in the plane that Nathan Drake was in at some point in Uncharted 3 and as the plane begins to malfunction with all the vechiles coming out with the yellow nets, in the background comes a blimp and a few monsters from the upcoming BioShock: Infinite). It works well for the most part, but after a while, you begin to think "What the hell is going on?!". It's very clear that all the stages have been worked on a lot, which is great. 9/10




Music

 A lot of the music are just direct copies of the original music from the games, but due to the whole mix of 2 games in each stage, they have been made to slowly transact to the next game's music which for the most part, works well. As for the original music in the game (like the one above), they just show how intense and epic the game can get, which is brilliant for the most part, so on that note, the music is great. 9/10

As for everything else, the cutscenes could have been worked on better and there could have been more characters added and maybe even a single player story mode. It's only slightly better than Smash Bros, that's all I can say. It is a very good game that celebrates 20 years of PlayStation in the best possible way it can. However it does sound like it was done over a short period of time so yeah. Still great fun to be had here. 9/10