A game that no one expected or wanted initially considering how blatant of a clone it was, has a seemingly tough task to prove that it can indeed co-exist with Nintendo’s critically acclaimed Super Smash Bros. series. Time will tell how consumers react to it but here are our impressions of the game after playing the recent beta. PSABR, developed by SuperBot Entertainment–a new entrant into this big bad world of video game development, have Sony’s full backing to create a world class product and an entire holiday season to themselves.
You can’t shake off that feeling of this being a huge clone, you really can’t. So with that out of the way, I can talk about the meat of the game. The core game design is surprisingly quite solid and indicates high production values, and people who’ve played Super Smash Bros. will instantly recognize the basic HUD and other things, because it is all so familiar!
There is a massive change in how the gameplay system works compared to Nintendo’s version, and that change is how you dispatch your foes. There is no health bar in PSABR, instead you have to use finishers to kill someone. There are three tiers each each more powerful than the other and with a lot more visual flair. You may recognize most of these moves if you’ve played the respective games for those characters, but such a change for veteran Smash players will result in a slight learning curve. New players, however will get the hang of the gameplay mechanics quite easier.
As the name suggests, the game contains iconic Playstation characters accumulated by Sony over the years, and while most of them are of an unknown variety, SuperBot keeps adding more third-party characters to the game bolstering the line-up and making the list familiar for a lot of people. The charm that Nintendo characters bring to the table is obviously missing here for some reason, but Playstation fans don’t need to be worried about all this.
The stages are also mix and matched from various levels taken from the games of these characters. Remember the amazing boss fight where Kratos pummeled Hades in God of War 3? That stage is now here in the game where Hades’ towering presence provides a fresh breath of air as the 2D Playstation characters like Radec, Kratos, Fat Princess and the likes pummel each other into oblivion.
The action is very fast paced here sometimes completely confusing the hell out of you due to the cartoony cell shaded graphics which does not pop out of the screen as much as I would have liked. The colours are dull as well, making everything look similar. Of course, I need to spend a lot of time with the game and master it so that these issues won’t be much worrisome but in a way this needs to be rectified by SuperBot.
The entire game is an exercise in beating the shit out of whoever you see and building up your AP bar by collecting the AP orbs. That’s all there is to it. There is strategy involved and that strategy is mostly not getting hit. The netcode is quite good and this is the one thing that impresses me a lot about the game as the original Super Smash Bros. was terrible with lag everywhere.
This game is still in development and will be released later this year, so hopefully they will improve some of the things I mentioned here.