E3 Hands On – PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

PlayStation fans, lace up the gloves and get ready to go to town; PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is shaping up to be a Golden Gloves contender later this year!  PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale pits our favorite PlayStation Characters against each other in a battle with up to three of your friends with some over the top attacks and hi-jinx befitting of each character in the lineup.  Wanderson75.net got a chance to sit down in Sony’s booth at the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo and get some hands on time.

While I’ve never played Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the concept of the PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is very similar.  Choose between a number of your favorite characters including PaRappa the Rapper, Nathan Drake, Kratos, Sweet Tooth, and more.  I decided to go with the recently announced Big Daddy from Bioshock as my character, while my opponents picked out Drake, Sly Cooper, and Fat Princess.

Controls are pretty simple; L2 is used for blocking, while the X, square, triangle, and circle buttons allow you to jump and perform light, medium, or heavy attacks respectively.  The R2 button activates your special attack.  This simple control scheme makes the game accessible to players of all levels of skill.

As you battle your opponents, you build up your power gauge, which has three levels.  Pressing R2 will fire off whatever special power you have for a given level.  For Big Daddy, I only used the level 2 attack during my match; which, in the case of the juggernaut of Rapture, was the only thing that I needed apparently.  The level 2 attack makes Big Daddy stronger, faster, and absolutely devastating to those in his grasp.  It was able to kill an opponent in just two or three hits, and within one round, I was able to clear the arena more than once, which resulted in my finishing first by more than 8 kills over the second closest opponent.  So it’s clear that while the game plays great, there’s some balancing issues that need to be addressed before it goes gold.

My experience with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was overall an enjoyable one.  While there are some tweaks that need to be done to ensure a good balance to all players, the title looks to be very promising and is sure to bring friends and family together in the living room later this year!  Stay tuned for our review on our around the release of the game.  In the meantime, we’ll be looking forward to getting our hands on every last tidbit of info that we can scrape up on PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.