Any discussion of strengths and weakness of All-Stars as
compared to Smash Bros will inevitably be dominated by game mechanics, so that
is where I’ll begin. All-Stars works in much the same way as Smash Brothers,
but with one critical difference. In Smash Bros you and up to three opponents spawn on a stage
and your goal is to knock your opponent(s) off the stage such that they cannot
get back on it and go out of bounds. When you strike an opponent you increase
their meter, which is visible under their name-card. As the meter increases
they are knocked back further with each attack, making it easier for them to be
sent flying off the stage. Each time an opponent is knocked off the stage you
either add a point to your score (while subtracting a point from their score) or
you decrease your opponent’s stock of lives, depending on match rules, and the
winner is either the person with the most points or the person who successfully
eliminated all other opponents (again, depending on the rules set before the
match starts). In All-Stars this formula is adjusted. When you strike an
opponent you are building up a meter for yourself and once the meter is full
enough you can unleash a super attack that can eliminate one or more opponents.
These super attacks have three different power levels and each one requires you
to build your meter sufficiently high enough to use it. Eliminating an opponent
gains you points (and reduces points for your opponent) and the winner of a
match is whoever has the most points at the end. Though seemingly small, this
difference scoring is quite significant and is the focal point of much of the debate of the comparative merits of Smash Bros and All-Stars.
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| Everyone building their meters. |
I’ve gone back and forth on what I think of All-Stars
scoring mechanic. On one hand I found it to be a novel change-up from the Smash
Bros formula, but on the other hand it can be a bit frustrating to build up
your meter and unleash a super attack, only for it to fail and then you’re back
to square one. After much thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Smash
Bros scoring formula is better overall. The way you score points in All-Stars
is not fundamentally wrong, but in Smash Bros you get a much stronger sense of
progression in knocking your opponents back further and further, making your
attacks feel meaningful. In spite of this issue, there are a lot of things that
I really like about All-Stars.
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| Sweet Tooth (left) unleashes his level 3 super move. |
Let’s start with the stages. Each stage that you battle
in is a creative interpretation of locations and events found in the various
games that the character roster is drawn from, as well as few that are from
games that don’t have a character representing them. Each stage will also at
some point either transition to different version of itself or be “invaded” by
a background character or event from a different game. For example, the Ratchet
and Clank based stage “Metropolis” starts out in a futuristic city but after
awhile it starts to rain and then the stage is invaded by the hydra from God of
War. The hydra will attack players from time to time and keeps everyone on
their toes. For those who don’t like this sort of thing you can turn hazards
off and there’s also the flat arena with no objects or platforms for the
purists, but I personally prefer the variety and insanity of the regular
stages. As I played through All-Stars there naturally were a few stages that I
gravitated towards, but there wasn’t a single one that I didn’t like.
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| Careful of the hydra. |
I was also impressed by how faithful each character’s
move sets were to the characters. Although I haven’t played the games of every
single character on the roster, the characters whose games I have experience
with played almost exactly the way I thought they would. Everything from
Dante’s stylized sword and gunplay to Ratchet’s wacky gadgets and Heihachi’s
hand-to-hand fighting played out as if the characters were directly
transplanted from their original games into All-Stars. Even characters like Sir
Daniel and Spike, whose games I have never played, somehow felt right. That
said, this faithfulness to the characters’ original games may have also caused
some of the issues I had with character balancing, since a few of the
characters (I’m looking at you, Kratos) seemed a bit too strong compared to
others. True, character balancing has also long been a problem with the Smash
Bros games as well, but I do wish a bit more effort was put into keeping
certain characters from dominating.
As something of an addendum to my thoughts on the
characters, I found the character “rivalries” in the arcade mode strangely
interesting. If you play arcade mode you’re given the closest thing to an
actual story that’s found in All-Stars, though it is bare bones at best. Each
character is going somewhere or doing something and battles their way through
multiple fights with the other characters along the way. In the second to last
battle, you face off with your character’s rival in a one-on-one fight and
settle the score between the two of you. Some of these rivalries make sense,
some are questionable and some are just odd. Still, I found myself playing
through arcade mode with every single character to see how their story played
out for each of them. I could have just gone to Youtube and saved some time,
but I was enjoying my time with arcade mode and playing through with each
character gave me a chance to try all of the characters out and see which ones
I liked.
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| The character roster (pre-dlc) |
In terms of music and sound, I knew
All-Stars was going to be good from the very beginning of the game. The song
that plays during the opening video caught me within the first few seconds and
from then on I was loving what my ears were hearing. Every stage in the game
has its own music, superbly adapted from the original game that the stage is
inspired by. The music even changes during the stage transitions, so, for
example, you’ll start in Parappa’s dojo with an upbeat hip-hop tune playing,
but after a minute or so the dojo walls break down, revealing that the city in
the background is under attack by a MAWLR and the music changes to the dramatic
synthetic sounds of the Killzone games. There’s also a number of small but nice
audio touches throughout the game that add to the package, from the background
menu music to the various things the characters say throughout the match. The
characters are even voiced by either the original voice actor from their game
or someone doing a very good impression of them. From start to finish,
All-Stars is an audio treat.
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| When the MAWLR in the background shows up, both the stage and the music change. |
Having finished my time with All-Stars, I’ve been gathering
my thoughts on the game and inevitably I’m brought back to the comparisons
between it and the Smash Bros games. In a sense, All-Stars can be compared to
the original Smash Bros game in that it shares many of the marks of a first
attempt that you see in the original Smash Bros game: an overall solid game
that is held back by mechanics that need a little bit of finesse, character
balancing issues and a comparatively small selection of characters, stages and
items. At the same time, an argument can be made that the comparison doesn’t
quite work because of the differing contexts that the two games out in. The
original Smash Bros game came out in 1999, when there wasn’t anything quite
like it, making a truly original experience. By 2012, when All-Stars came out,
we had seen three Smash Bros games and a few similar titles, meaning that the
genre had been well defined and we had a good idea of what worked and what
didn’t. In the final analysis the Smash Bros games are better, but I have to
commend developer Superbot Entertainment for making a valiant effort in
creating All-Stars, and trying to put a new twist on the Smash Bros formula.
With any luck, we’ll one day get a sequel.
