Smash Bros: Ultimate The Review

Hello there, Oscarrocket Here with a new post. This time i will be reviewing one of the most hyped games of 2018, Smash Bros: Ultimate! That’s right the largest and craziest games in the franchise (so far). Does it lead up to the title or does it flop, find out in this review.

Smash Bros: Ultimate is an absolutely huge game with a huge roster of 69 fighters (not including DLC), 103 stages (also not including DLC), a large library of music tracks and a large single player story mode it sure is a complete package. This game is absolutely crazy 20 hours in I haven’t unlocked all the fighters, haven’t played on all the stages and I keep running in to new things in the single player mode. This game is so big this review is going to be divided into 4 paragraphs, one on the roster, one on the stage selection, one on the story mode and one on positives and (hopefully not too many) negatives, and for a bit of character, these paragraphs like in true fighting game style will be called rounds. So, lets get into it.

ROUND 1. Characters

Smash Bros Ultimate is an absolute beast when it comes to the character roster with 69 fighters (excluding DLC). You may be asking yourself “How on earth have they managed that many characters, surely you must be joking!” Well i’m not. Smash Bros: Ultimate has this many fighters because every single character is here, from series veterans like Mario and Link to everyone’s favourite little guy Pichu. It also has a decent list of newcomers such as King K. Rool and Isabelle. One point I have to make is that a lot of the new fighters could technically count as clones, or as how Nintendo are now calling them, echo fighters. I personally don’t mind this as they don’t take up too much development time and a lot them play quite differently then what you would expect. Nintendo have also said that DLC characters will be coming to the game and they have announced that at least five characters (not counting piranha plant, as he counts as an early adopter bonus) and have revealed Joker from Persona 5. Above all Smash Ultimate has an amazing roster (even without Waluigi) which has a lot of crazy combinations, my favourite has got to be Isabelle and Snake, which is surprisingly well balanced.

ROUND 2. Stages

When it comes to the stage selection I would say it is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Some stages I love such as New Donk City and Halberd while I find some choices bad and just confusing such as Hanenbow. I find it a mix bag as a couple of these stages feel repetitive and I felt as if they could improved this feeling I have with the stage selection by looking through the catalogue and picking out some more crazy stages like Pokéfloats or Pack Maze which are two interesting stages that could have easily spiced things up. This could get fixed in the future with the DLC pass as they have announced 5 stages will be coming with that. My verdict on the stages is that the selection is fine and a lot of the stages do stand out, its just that some stages feel repetitive. I find that the new stages are great though as the two of the four represent the newcomers Inkling and Simon and Richter Belmont really well, while the other two represent two of Nintendo’s most well received and bestselling titles of late, Mario Odyssey and BOTW extremely well which will really entice recent Nintendo adopters.

ROUND 3. Single player campaign

Just a short warning to anyone who hasn’t bought themselves a copy of the game yet or hasn’t played it yet. There might be some minor spoilers ahead, they will be quite minor as I myself haven’t completed the campaign. So if you wan’t to go into the game completely blind, don’t read past this warning or just skip to the final paragraph. You have been warned!

Smash Bros: Ultimate has got a story mode. This story mode is titled world of light and is the first single player story campaign since Brawl’s subspace emissary and the second in the series’s history. The mode involves you collecting a new type of collectable, spirits. Spirits are, well the spirits of other characters, some are fighters while others are different side characters from franchises which other fighters belong to. These aren’t just little collectables though, kind of like Brawl’s stickers, you can attach these spirits to your fighter to apply effects to them, they can be anything from giving you character a speed boost to making them immune to stage hazards. Spirits replace trophies, which may seem at the start that there is less content in the game because of this but the quantity of spirits out number the number of trophies you would usually find in a normal entry into the series. Spirits are usually one of four types neutral, grab, attack an shield. Similar to Pokémon types, different spirits are either weaker or stronger depending on what type they are fighting against. For example, attack beats grab, grab beats shield and shield beats attack. This basic formulae is the basis for world of light. Now that i have gotten the technical stuff out of the way lets get onto the story. The story is a alright, it’s not Zelda or Xenoblabe but it’s good. The story is about this malevolent force called Galeem and its quest to destroy the world to create its own. It does this by trying to capture all the fighters and to create empty clones of them. Then Galeem gets spirits from other characters and turns the empty clones into fighters. Luckily all hope isn’t lost as somehow Kirby, Sakurai’s creation, is the only one left alive and it’s up to him to rescue the spirits and to save some of his friends. I haven’t completed the story mode but I have played it for 6 hours and the amount of content seems huge and no two fights are the same. I will hopefully post a full review on the story mode alone once I finish it.

FINAL ROUND. Positives and Negatives.

As you can see from my review Smash Bros: Ultimate is a great all inclusive package. It has a great character roster full of different fighters to chose from, a decent selection of stages and a huge story mode. Here are a list of positives and negatives from my time playing this game.

Positives:

A great selection of fighters.

The new character choices were great.

The story mode is great.

The looks beautiful docked and un-docked.

A complete package of a game.

Negatives:

Missing a few modes, namely target blast and home run contest.

A couple stage choices are questionable at best.

The online has had a few connection issues and could use a little work here and there.

The Verdict

Smash Bros: Ultimate is a fun game that’s great to play solo, online or locally with friends. Above all I would say that it definitely lives up to the hype. I would definitely say that it’s a must have title for the Switch. I rate it 9/10