PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Sony’s lukewarm execution of a Smash Bros. concept, will have its online multiplayer shut down at the end of October, the company announced this week. The Oct. 25 shutdown doesn’t kill the game outright — the single-player campaign and local multiplayer are still available.
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, developed by SuperBot Entertainment, launched in 2012 on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. It featured a roster of 24 characters, most of them from Sony franchises (Nathan Drake, Sly Cooper) and some from third-party publishers (BioShock’s Big Daddy, Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke). The lineup and themed stage format greatly resembled Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. franchise.
In the single-player arcade mode, players duked it out with the rest of the lineup, a character-specific sub-boss and then the final boss, Polygon Man (no relation). PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale also featured cross-platform play between the PS3 and Vita, which of course will no longer be available.
The game launched to a fair-to-middling critical reception, and was followed with additional downloadable content characters over the next year. It was given away to PlayStation Plus subscribers in August 2014.
Source: Polygon
