PlayStation All-Stars Looks Smashingly Familiar

Now you can smash stuff with your bros while playing as Kratos and Sweet Tooth.

Earlier this week, we caught a teasing glimpse of Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale, Sony’s multiplayer crossover brawler answer to Nintendo’s popular Super Smash Bros. Today, the PlayStation Blog formally unveiled the game.

As it turns out, PlayStation All-Stars doesn’t so much appear to be an “answer” to Super Smash Bros as it appears to be “the exact same game.” Seriously, if you hadn’t told me that this footage had come from PS All-Stars, my first thought would have been “Oh hey, PaRappa’s in the next Smash Bros? Sweet.”

In all fairness to Sony, copying other good ideas that competitors have has been the way of the industry since the dawn of Pong, and Sony’s only real problem here is how subtle they’ve utterly failed to be.

Developer SuperBot Entertainment does seem enthusiastic about the idea, too – in the reveal trailer, we hear from the game’s director Omar Kendall, who discusses the ways that different PlayStation universes interact in this game. While we’d all expect Kratos and Sweet Tooth to know how to throw down, how would characters like PaRappa and Fat Princess fight? (The answer: With his kung-fu training from Chop Chop Master Onion and her love of cake, respectively).

The confirmed roster thus far includes the aforementioned Kratos, Sweet Tooth, PaRappa, and Fat Princess as well as Sly Cooper (the Thievius Raccoonus) and Colonel Radec from Killzone. One can only imagine that the likes of Nathan Drake and Ratchet (and Clank?) are likely to join the fray as well.

Sony’s first-party lineup may not be as iconic as Nintendo’s, but the PS1 and PS2 libraries are some of the most legendary of all time, so there’s no shortage of characters from which SuperBot Entertainment can pull. How about Wander from Shadow of the Colossus, or the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy? That Royal Rainbow attack would be way OP.