Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3): Super Sony Brothers Brawl

My disconnection with Nintendo is pretty well documented at this point. Just after the SNES they really started to let me down on a pretty consistent basis. I'd get a few things I'd really like but for the most part I bought all that much. But one game that would sort of bring me back was Smash Brothers. I didn't own it or often play it, but I'll be fucking damned if my friends are going to be better than me at a game. So I got good with one or 2 characters and if a friend fired it up I wouldn't be totally lost.

So I had to laugh when Sony decided to throw their hat in the ring with, let's be honest, a complete knock off of the concept so long after Smash Brothers had already become the standard. Reviews were lukewarm, the price kept dropping, but I never bit on this one. I don't have friends over so it never seemed worth it. But it finally got marked as a PSN freebie so might as well download it to see what it has to offer.

PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE

As you might expect, this game doesn't have much of a story. Games that tend to be mash-ups usually don't and when they do they are typically pretty abysmal, (honestly Cross Edge still gives me nightmares). But to best summarize the stories of the game, you basically get a miniature telling of the story or something akin to it from the protagonist of that game. So when I first fired the game up I instantly gravitated to Nariko of Heavenly Sword.

She gives a small monologue and some stills of introspection about her and the power of the Heavenly Sword, much like she did in between the chapters of the actual game.  It runs for about a minute or two and then plunks you right into the game. You get an animated cutscene between her and another character near the end of the game (in my case, Dante from DmC: Devil May Cry {which confused me, Kratos would have made more sense.}). After which you fight some floating digital head things for a final boss, which rings a little familiar to Smash Brothers giant hand. The closing is a few more stills and another monologue. It's nothing flashy but I suppose it works.

Sorry longtime DMC fans. It's the skinny andro-prettyboy Dante.

I was curious to see if this was the norm for the game's standard, so I fired up a 2nd game this time picked Nathan Drake of Uncharted. Much like the previous playthough, I was treated to a handful of stills of Drake and Sully sitting at a table on a beach discussing a map that Drake has found, and that how a map this detailed has to lead to something. I'm curious how that will work for characters like the Big Daddy or Sackboy, but I guess to give the single player mode some substance it works.

I guess the first thing that I noted about the game is how......unpolished, it felt. The opening menu is just a flat background with some menu options. It's functional, but boring. The music that plays during the menu also just felt kind of uninspired and generic. I don't think I could hum the Smash Bros. menu to use, but I know it has a very boisterous and dramatic feel to it, and it's notable enough that I distinctly remember it. Even the character select menu has a boredom about it. Two lines of portraits with a bigger selected one on the bottom. Again, it's functional but lacking a bit of pizzazz.

Not a whole lot to it.

Then we have the actual game, and it functions in that same kind of platform fightery way you would come to expect. You are placed on some notable level from the of the character's respective games and you are to duke it out with one to three other characters on screen at any given time. The story mode seems to be the same each time so it usually opens up with Chop-Chop Master Onionhead's dojo from Parappa the Rapper. This will eventually fall apart to have I believe a metal gear firing rockets at you from the distance. 

This brought me to my next point of contention. The controls of the game felt very loose, nothing ever seem to react for me as immediately as I wanted it to. Now, this might be something that is kind of the norm for Smash Bros. players, but it never felt right to me. I assume the control schemes are similar: You have three attack buttons and jump button, each of them providing different attacks depending on the direction you are pressing when you attack, and item to pick up items, and your "super" button. 

How the game works differently to Smash Bros is in Playstation All-Stars is you don't have the running percentage of damage taken. In this, the more damaging your attacks are the faster it fills up your super gauge. You can still score kills for knocking somebody off the stage, but the fastest way to do so is to rack up specialty kills. Admittedly, this takes away some of the feeling of danger and might make you more likely to dive headfirst into combat because if nobody has a super charged, you are not in a lot of danger to be killed.

To give you context, I started playing my story mode with Nariko and much like her original game, the Heavenly Sword breaks apart for fast chain blade combos. So it was very easy to wailing on the square button and let her start to liquefy anything in her path. But these are light attacks so my little gauge would bump up in increments to 5 or 7. If I ventured over to the other buttons they would do slightly more damage depending on the move.

By concept alone, some characters are just more fun to play than others.

Once I would hit one full bar, I could trigger a special where Nariko summons Kai and blows up a barrel. If enemies are caught in the blast I am awarded a kill. At level 2, Nariko produces a cannon like on the castle battlements and can fire off shots at the other players. The aim is minimal but you get a few shots and any that connect score a kill. At level 3, gets that heavenly glow, and her chains extend to full range and enemies who are caught are quickly ended.

It was an interesting way to try to have the same feel of a Smash game but without directly copying the system. The problem I have with it is I don't feel that it really emphasizes the tension you get when the battle sways. When you see that percentage staring to climb, you really get the weight that you can be blasted of at any moment. In Playstation All-Stars I might have occasionally checked to see if some else had a charge up. I barely touched the dodge/block button because I never saw the need to. I never had some eminent feeling of being threatened.

The only time things really kicked up was a later stage matchup where I noticed one of the computer players actually ringing up a number of kills, and there was concern that it might take the round. Due to some last minute heroics on a level 3 special I managed to pull that one away, but it was the only time in the entire play though where I felt things got a little a tense.

Is there no truly notable villain to be the final boss of this mess? Is just random
geometric face the best they can do? It's pointless and stupid. 

I think one of the other drawbacks to this title (and probably why it took so long for it to be produced) is the overall roster. Some of these characters make sense to me, but some of them don't. If we are looking at legitimate stars exclusive to the console, then guys like Nathan Drake, Kratos, or Jak & Daxter make sense. But people like Raiden, the Big Daddy, or Dante don't make sense to me because their games cross platform. Sure some got their start on PlayStation but hell, Bioshock came to the PS systems last.

And then you have the reaches, Kat from Gravity Rush was in a single game on a console that didn't sell well. Fat Princess you play a character who is ultimately nonfunctional in her own series and is more or less offensive to an entire gender. I would argue that Cole McGrath from Infamous absolutely deserves to be in this lineup, but putting in both an evil and good version of him feels like you are padding out space because you just don't have enough "branded" characters to put in the game. Although in Sony's defense, Nintendo has pulled this shit too. (Looking at you Star Wolf and Lucas). The bottom line here that Sony doesn't really have enough independent notable properties to really flesh out a roster like this.

This roster forced me to give credit to Nintendo. They may just put out the same few
games every year, but they managed to flesh out a pretty meaty roster for Smash.

There are a smattering of other game modes such as a training mode, a challenge mode, and naturally a multiplayer mode. None of them are remarkable or interesting enough to even bother to comment on other than "hey look, there they are"

I'll give credit that the alternate costumes are kind of cool. I don't know why but I have always been a fan of alternate costumes in games and love to try to unlock them, but absolutely started to loathe it once they started putting DLC tags on them. They really should be rewards, not costly extras.

Ultimately, Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale pretty much was exactly as I expected it to be: a flat, uninspired knock off of an immensely popular game that has been done already more competently in previous installments. I'd be hard pressed to say it's a bad game because it's at the very least functional, but I personally didn't have much fun with it. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I played it with friends but I honestly don't think it will be in my memory enough to even bother to try it.

The game is currently free on PSN for PS+ users and I've seen it for 20 bucks otherwise. If you need to get Smash out of your system without owning a Nintendo console this is probably a reasonable sub, but honestly I wouldn't blame you for skipping this one. Free was fine, I wouldn't pay 20 for this.

Dead Space 3 (PS3): Resident Evil 6 Syndrome....

During the time when EA was running those ads "Your Mom Hates This" for Dead Space 2, I was proudly exclaiming how much I loved it by using such phrases as "I wish this game had a liquid form so I can get naked and roll around in a tub of it." I'll let you sit on that image for a few seconds.

Aside from some slight pacing issues, it basically improved on most of the the complaints I had with the original Dead Space. I have always been a huge advocate of this series feel it never got the credit it should. So naturally I was a bit hesitant when I learned Dead Space 3 takes place on icy planet and the game features 2 player co-op. Not exactly thrilled about that, but I love this series too much to not give it the benefit of the doubt.

DEAD SPACE 3:(PS3)

Two months after the events of Dead Space 2, our survivors Isaac Clark and Ellie Langford have fallen into a bit of a tumultuous schism and have broken up. The Unitologists have taken their cultish fervor to military form, going across the galaxy to activate "Markers" and speed up the Necromorph infection to cause convergence and allow them to be reborn after their grizzly murders.

We cut to Isaac looking older, tired, and heartbroken as he replays a answering machine message from Ellie. She tells him he is going to continue the fight against the Necromorphs and Unitologists without his help. After a bit of a fit throwing some pictures on the ground, his room is invaded by two soldiers of EarthGov: Carver (the co-op player) and Cap. Robert Norton (a massive douche). After a less than friendly introduction he is basically escorted at gunpoint to go after Ellie whom these soldiers lost contact with. Begrudgingly, Isaac follows them but before they even make it out the door the Unitologists attack them.

While technically a good guy, Robert is a first class douchebag.

So with this premise, I was accepting an ready to jump in to the fun that is the Dead Space universe. As soon as I take control of the game I follow my marker and meet up with the two pricks and immediately I am swamped by unitologist soldiers firing machine guns at me. But thankfully, it tells me tapping R3 will allow me to crouch, which is pretty handy considering all the cover around like chest high walls or parked cars.

Fuck. You.

It took me less than a matter of seconds of taking control of the game to be so gut wrenchingly disappointed I almost put the game down. Dead Space is a game that was hinged on creepy monsters, dark claustrophobic settings, and scary atmosphere. If I wanted to fucking duck behind cover to pop my head up and shoot at asshole human beings with guns, I could have picked up ALMOST ANY OTHER FUCKING GAME WITH A GUN IN IT. Fuck. 

Grrrrrrrr.......

In my last review I said I wasn't so backwards thinking that games couldn't update or change, but seriously, come the fuck on. Why would you take a very interesting property and try to make feel like every other 3rd person shooter on the market. I know they sell well but we're good on those, we have plenty. I want to play Dead Space.

Thankfully, this mission lasts only really long enough to serve as a tutorial and once I get away from the shitdick soldiers we get ourselves into space, and then Dead Space starts to feel like it should all over again. The controls will be pretty familiar to series regulars as they are virtually unchanged from the previous titles in this series. The only real functional changes that I was able to find is that usually R3 was the guide button to show you which way to go (a feature I love, btw) but now you have to hold it a second because as I mentioned above, it shares with crouch. On the other analog, they have also added in a dodge roll, but to be honest I never really found an enemy where it was useful.

There was another bit of a jarring shock to me is I was only able to carry two weapons this time, another throw back to the 3rd person cover based shooters they are trying to ape. This to me on one hand was kind of disappointing because I don't like it when a game tries to limit me, but on the other hand I played most of Dead Space 1 and 2 with the initial plasma cutter you start the game with. The more you would upgrade that thing, the more of a beast it would become.

The problem is, that brings us to one of Dead Space 3's newer features, fully customizable weapons. In the previous Dead Space's  you would unlock a weapon and then have to add power nodes to increase its clip, rate of fire, power, and so on. In this version you collect various parts and depending on how you add them it creates a new weapon.

This can be incredibly intimidating because the combinations are pretty plentiful. After a few minutes its easy to get frustrated and even worse its hampered by the fact you can only hold 2 guns. there really isn't even a good way to look at all of the weapons you've created to see which are stronger back to back aside from equipping them then unequipping them. It requires going through too many menus. However, the game does have a cool little workshop feature where you can load a save, tinker with your weapons then let in some monsters to see how they play out. I kinda wish I noticed this feature first because my starting cutter really wasn't cutting it (ba dum tsss).

But if you have the ability to make tons of different weapons, then how are you going to sort out ammo for all the different variations of them? Well, this gives us the unfortunate issue of only having one type of ammo. Its dropped virtually all the time, its very cheap to create, and works for everything. So a lot of the tense fear you would get from not having enough ammo is effectively dashed. Seeing 4 necromorphs baring at you and knowing you are on your last 10 shots of your cutter just added to the fear and atmosphere. Now I can pretty much just rapid fire with little fear of ever running out of ammo. 

Something else I noticed early is that necromorphs are WAY harder to kill this time around. That's a good thing too. The seasoned Dead Space player knows the score: knee shot, arm shot, stomp. In the previous two games this was pretty much all you needed to take down virtually everything in the game, so really you had no reason to upgrade your other weapons because the initial plasma cutter was such a necromorph wrecking beast.

Not my video, but thank you RetroKid91 for doing a game play video without Commentary.

Now the baddies have a lot more spring in their step, they have much more sporadic movement, and they a much harder to put down. It didn't take me long to realize I have to bulk my weapons up way more often or I wasn't going to last.  There is a handful of new types of zombie like Necromorphs as well which also add to the challenge, but generally, you know exactly what to do on each type of monster you come across.

I've said before that this series always kind of struggled when it came to the pacing. What I mean by that is never really get around to building tension by letting fear sink it. Its just start, monsters, shooting. Dead Space 3 really makes no attempt to try to pace the game for horror, because much like all the other 3rd person shooters its emulating it'd rather you start shooting at shit right away. And again, that's disappointing to me because survival horror as a genre just seems to be fading to the wayside.

Easy to kill on their own, but if they get you in groups things can get hairy.

I guess that's why the story feels like it matches this frenetic pace. There are only a handful of downtime moments in the game before shit starts to go haywire. A simple briefing on the bridge of your ship results in all the glass on the ship getting destroyed and sucking you into space (which for a spaceship, seems like a massive design oversight) and as you fling into space you have to fly past meteorites and mines to catch up to the cargo box so you can fly it to the ship you were trying to land on. This is just one example and this kinda thing happens at almost every turn. The final sequence of the game to put it simply, goes completely fucking bananas to the point where I can't figure out what the hell is happening or how we even got there.

That being said, this is the game where Issac really comes the most off as a human being. He was basically just a silent protagonist in the first game and could have been a robot for all we care. In the second game they tried to give him more of a face and dialog, but it came off as kind of generic. In this game, we have some back story, some history, some missing information to learn between games. There is some interesting and realistic emotion between the cast and their interactions (except Robert maybe), so from a story telling standpoint, this is probably the best Dead Space has done in this area.

There is one incredibly jarring flaw I've been trying not to get worked up about. As you have probably already heard before the release, one of EA's big moves "for" the player was to introduce micro transactions you find in mobile games. Their logic is if you want to get more supplies and guns and whatever, those players have the option to pay a little bit to get a few more items in the game.

Oh EA, does your generosity know no bounds? EA, you are notorious and roundly hated for your constant cash grabs. I personally hold you guys responsible for the reason I can't pick up a used game and give the online modes a try without having to pay an extra fucking 10 dollars for it, (I mean I never would, but its the principal of the fact).

But you know what? I was willing to let it slide, It didn't affect my ability to play the game at all and for the most part I didn't seem at all hampered by the fact that I was playing the single player and not the multiplayer. I also discovered the glitch that infinitely respawns some of the items you are supposed to purchase. EA said that stuff is there on purpose, and they don't intend to patch it. Alright then, good on you EA. I was able to play through the game start to finish and didn't feel handicapped, and after a while had a pretty good time with it.

But then you guys did make a patch like 3 days later, and I'll be fucking damned if that glitch wasn't the first thing to fucking go. Right after you said you weren't going to remove it. Seriously? Fuck you guys. 

I'll tell you what though, much like Resident Evil 6 before it I had a laundry list of complaints about this game when I picked it up... But then a few levels into the game they became something I just shrugged off. Not much longer after that I didn't even notice it anymore. Then I managed to beat the game and did something I very very rarely do: I kept playing.

Set the game to hard mode, modded some new weapons, went to New Game+ and played the game almost completely through again. In today's 6 hour video game world we live in, where new triple-A releases come out on a weekly bases, this almost never happens. I crank out a story and them bam, off to the next game. So despite all my bitching, I still managed to get more than 60 dollars worth of entertainment out of a game I did nothing but complain about my first time through.

So again like Resident Evil 6,  I find myself at a bit of a loss for if I recommend the game or not. So I guess the way to go about it is like this: Is Dead Space 3 fun? Yes. Does Dead Space 3 have a great story? Yes. Does the game feel like it belongs with the series? ehhhh, that's where it gets grey to me.

As I said earlier, I bought this game because I wanted to play Dead Space. This is a game that hinged its first two games on ambiance, loneliness,  fear, and excessive gore. The game manages to draw an immense fear in you because for two games it sets the pace that you are completely alone and every single dead body has the potential to rip you limb from limb if you don't see it in time. And one of the big aspects I liked about is, you couldn't headshot things. Lots of crazy different enemies and different weaknesses on a lot of them.

Dead Space 3 didn't feel like Dead Space to me, at least not the whole time. It launched me right into a segment where I have to duck behind cover, and shoot at people holding guns. That's Uncharted, that's Gears of War, that's Mass Effect 3(another example of this), that is NOT Dead Space.  Its infuriating to become invested in something, grow a passion for it, love it, advocate it, then have that love betrayed because it wants to be something else because it sells better. 

The game I love is in here somewhere. As I play through level there are a large number of segments that feel exactly like how this game should be. But then every so often I'll reach this open area with a bunch of containers strewn about that are about chest high and I groan loudly. They don't need to be there. They shouldn't be there.

But ultimately, yes Dead Space 3 is a good game and fun to play. It plays enough like it should to satisfy me as a gamer, but I can't help but feel a twinge of disappointment that they knuckled under and tried to copycat other shooters.

Dead Space, you sold out.