Welcome to Online Saturday.
For today's video i tried out the newly released My Hero Ultimate Rumble on PS4 from BandaiNamco and Byking.
Other than what was written on the PSN Store page, i knew nothing about this game. but as battle royale style games are something i don't really play, i saw this as a good choice for giving the genre a go. i'm a little familiar with My Hero Academia/僕のヒーローアカデミア so i wasn't going to be too lost with who's who.
What's great is that the game starts off with two tutorial sections. they each take their time to explain, have an image of what buttons on the controller are used, and a little image showing what'll happen. it's very approachable. then the second section is a little battle against the computer where you get to try out all the moves you learned. the CPU opponents weren't dangerous no smart, so again it's accessible for people to try out stuff without the fear of other people. But, the first online issue occurred after completing the battle. it kicked me out of the game to the start menu and when i logged back in i had to do all the tutorials again, so i cut that from the video.
Once the tutorials are completed, we're introduced to the main home screen. each section has it's own small tutorial information box which is very welcomed. it also feels welcoming as it lets you chose whether you want to go straight into a game or explore the options. i wanted to check out the other sections and other than a sparsely populated store, it was all fairly standard with no surprises nor was i left with any questions.
Getting into a game is not as straight forward as i expected. When you start looking for a game, it first tries to find two other players. when it does, it waits for all three to ready up. But, the game is often unresponsive for long periods of time. in this video, two of us were ready and the third wasn't. But there's no way to kick them from the team or to give up matchmaking. i was stuck waiting for the other player. it truly felt like i would have no other choice but to quit the game and this is a very big oversight from the developers. Once all three players are ready, the game then tries to find a lobby for our team to join. once it finds one, it places in it with all the other players, but only briefly as then it loads up the map. from this screen you can choose where you want to spawn in. once everyone has, it then reveals where all the other players are! i've not played battle royales before i so don't know if this is something unique to My Hero Ultimate Rumble, but it was fun when it was revealed.
Once i was playing, it was quite fun. we're all new to this game so it was also chaotic. thankfully, it's easy to communicate with your teammates by putting markers down and we used it quite well. the stages seemed big with different terrains and heights. as everyone was moving so fast, it took a little time to adjust and learn a new play style. but after a few minutes i felt like i was having fun and that each of the other characters were quite different from my own. And then, more connection issues as our game was ended early and i was logged out and kicked to the start screen. then i had to wait before the game was ready for me to get to the main screen.
That was the only online gaming experience i had. the game would fail to join a game and then would disconnect a third time, logging me out. by this time, i had been playing for nearly an hour and a half and i was getting frustrated so i called it a day. but i will return to the game.
It did soo much right. the tutorial is great. the home screen isn't cluttered and is fairly logical in it's layout and what each section does. the graphics on my launch model PlayStation 4 were great. loading times were about what i expected and so were the fans. i felt like it was similar to the Gundam Evolution games in that the character models look fantastic and accurate, in this case to the anime, whereas the world is a bit generic but still looking like as you'd expect. the controls felt tight and it felt and looked like each character was different. But the online experience wasn't great. you can play this game offline versus the computer, but i just can't recommend this game with the online as bad as it is. it's either due to demand being so high or the online just being a buggy mess. maybe wait a month or news via social media before giving this game a go.
