PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover Mascot Fighter developed by Superbot Entertainment, running on the Super Smash Bros.-esque premise of a cast of Sony's gaming properties joining to beat each other senseless. Initially known as "Title Fight", the game was leaked on October 30 of 2011 by The Paul Gale Network before being officially announced by Game Trailers TV and on the PlayStation blog on April 26, 2012.

However in September 27, 2018, Sony announced to shutdown PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale online servers in October 15, along with other two PlayStation 3 games Twisted Metal and Warhawk. Until it was delayed and changed to January 31, 2019.

The game features characters and stages from:

The roster:

  • From God Of War: Kratos
  • From Fat Princess: Fat Princess assisted by the villagers.
  • From Sly Cooper: Sly Cooper
  • From Killzone: Colonel Mael Radec
  • From Twisted Metal: Sweet Tooth
  • From Parappa the Rapper: Parappa the Rapper
  • From BioShock: Big Daddy
  • From Uncharted: Nathan Drake
Tropes used in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale include:
  • Alternate Company Equivalent: This should be obvious. Interestingly, this game is being released late in the life-cycle of Sony's third major console generation. Sound familiar?
    • One odd aspect of the game's philosophies to note is that Smash Bros is primarily focused on ring-outs while PSASBR works with flashy supers. Kind of like sumo wrestling as opposed to Professional Wrestling.
  • Art Shift: Each playable character will be rendered in their respectable series' distinctive art style. Even Parappa, who's two-dimensional!
  • Beehive Barrier: The Gravity Shield from Wipe Out is a usable item.
  • BFG: The always-powerful RPG-7 from Uncharted appears as a usable item. It holds 3 shots, like in its home series (though the reload doesn't seem especially long). There is also Radec's plasma cannon, the Sweet Bot's gatling gun and Nathan's Grenade Launcher.
  • Blade on a Stick: The Spear of Destiny from God of War is a usable melee item.
  • Bullet Hell: The Sandover Village/19th Hole stage becomes this later on... with golf balls.
  • The Cameo
  • The Computer Shall Taunt You: Buzz will verbally abuse players that answer his quizzes incorrectly.
  • Cool Versus Awesome: Because the guy who killed Ares fighting a psychopathic clown killer isn't either cool or awesome. Neither is an obese princess and a raccoon thief fighting a freak of nature trapped in a scuba suit and an adventurer who possesses rotten luck.
  • Dueling Games: Will be (more or less) directly taking on Super Smash Bros., more so if Nintendo reveals a new game.
  • Essence Drop: AP is treated this way.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: The stages will feature many environmental hazards, such as Sandover Village, which has a giant Lurker Shark swimming beneath the stage who will eat players too slow to get back to the main platform. The Metropolis stage has the Hydra, which will periodically attack the players as well.
  • Finishing Move: The game is based around these. The only way to win is to destroy opponents with them, and the main reason for attacking at all is to build AP to use a Super. Level 1 Supers usually take out one opponent over a small area, Level 2 Supers can potentially take out multiple opponents over a wide area and Level 3 Supers can often annihilate the opposition.
  • Follow the Leader: Almost exactly the same concept as Super Smash Bros., but with Sony's characters and with a totally different method of defeating opponents.
  • Free-Floor Fighting: The Dreamscape level is constantly being built, adding extra platforms and occasionally lowering ground. This is just one example.
  • Guest Fighter: Big Daddy, at least for now.
  • Hailfire Peaks: Several stages will smoosh together environments from completely different games for unique mash-ups (which includes mash-ups remixing the original game's music). The Sandover Village stage for instance will have several Hot Shots Golfers in the background sending golf balls onto the stage for low damage to those struck with them. Further, Buzz! will stand in the background of the slowly-morphing LittleBigPlanet stage to occasionally quiz the players. Later in the Metropolis stage, the Hydra will appear, shortly after attacking/eating Captain Qwark. Probably the strangest one is a stage that combines the underworld of God of War with Patapon.
  • Homage: To name a few:
    • The Power Meter from Hot Shots Golf shows up when the golfers are about to take their swing in the Sandover Village/19th Hole stage, also serving to warn the players to dodge the oncoming hail of golf balls.
    • During Parappa's Level 3 Super, the screen starts showing his game's interface.
    • "Fever" appears on the top right corner of the Underworld stage when the Patapon are getting ready to throw their spears on the stage.
    • The level editing content thermometer from LittleBigPlanet shows up in the Dreamscape/Buzz stage.
  • Interesting Situation Duel: One level has Hades trying to attack the players while fending off a band of Patapon warriors.
  • Limit Break: Each character will have a meter that fills as they pummel their opponent, allowing them to use up to 3 levels of Super moves. Level 1 Supers are usually brief but very strong attacks, Level 2 Supers tend to be a wide-area attack while Level 3 Supers could be accurately compared to Final Smashes.
  • Long Title: A complaint being thrown at the game, but it's hardly unjustified. The game will likely be acronymized to PSASBR.
  • Mood Dissonance: Intentionally invoked. Superbot wants there to be a charm in the juxtaposition of setting lighthearted E-rated characters against M-rated murderers in stages that jump between tone and theme routinely.
"In terms of integrating them all into the same world, part of this is supposed to feel like a mash up. We're not just trying to sanitize everything, we kind of want them to stand apart from one another - that's where the irreverence and the humor comes from. It's a challenge, but ultimately we've found a pretty decent balance of getting them all to live in the same world."
—Director Chan Park, Kotaku interview
  • One-Hit Kill: Supers and certain environmental hazards.
  • Padded Sumo Gameplay: The game is heavily based around chaotic, highly offensive yet mostly ineffectual combat. No amount of combos will kill a character and moves which drain AP are rare (item attacks, environmental hazards and Sly's invisible strike). Attacks exist specifically to build meter and built meter remains the same even when a character dies. The game's lack of a health bar can make it seem like this.
  • Power Creep, Power Seep: Invoked when you take Parappa, who fights with music and karate, and pit him against Radec, who is a cold-blooded Colonel Badass and owns a lot of heavy firepower. Right now, taken to its logical extreme with Nathan Drake, who hails from one of the more realistic (sort of) series featured in-game and has no powers whatsoever.
"While no one doubts Fat Princess’ moxy, she probably wouldn’t fair too well against Kratos’ homicidal rages and penchant for ripping the heads off of enemies. Balance is key."