Destruction All Stars – PS5 game review

So, I was one of the people actually really excited and hyped for this title. It did indeed seem too steep for £70, so I can fully understand the delay and swap to PS Plus and, let me be clear, that was a fantastic move by Sony. However, it feels like it should have been a PS Plus game in the first place. The production values are definitely up there with a £70 title, the content, however, is not.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Destruction All Stars is very simple and this isn’t a bad thing, as there are definitely tactics and some depth. However, neither the cars nor going on foot feels very fun. While it certainly isn’t boring, and is actually quite serviceable, it feels like its missing something.

You don’t really do much on foot except raising obstacles, avoiding cars, jumping onto platforms, and wall running to pick up some gems (which fill your special gauge). But that isn’t the big issue. The problem, at least for me, is how big the arenas are in this mode and how much time you end up spending simply just to get to a car. The car combat itself is fine, but all you do is crash into people. There are no weapons or anything else and the camera doesn’t really let you see what’s going on which makes the experience suboptimal.

This means that you can never really be consistent in matches. Sometimes I come in 12th place, sometimes I’m in first by a huge margin. When you fill up your bar from gems and attacking enemies, you can spawn your hero car which has its own special ability, and that is the only time your car actually feels genuinely fun. You finally have something more to do than just trying to crash into people. I personally love Ratu who’s hero car has its own special gauge, and unlike a lot of other heroes, once the gauge is full and you activate it, she has a 5-second countdown to a big explosion AND IT DESTROYS. So, props for Ratu. Characters as a whole feel good to play, if not a bit floaty on the jumps, the cards however are really good, and I love how they feel. An actual MK-style mode could work really well, I think.

Modes

The main changes to how a match plays out boil down to its modes. There are single-player and arcade modes (offline mode) in DAS, which consist of challenges and matches vs bots. They’re not really fun or entertaining, but they do have their own cutscenes based on the character you’re playing which adds some backstory to them and is a nice touch. The main hour put into the game, however, comes from the multiplayer modes.

Mayhem is a classic deathmatch mode, where the arenas feel too big, and quite often I find everyone is in one tiny spot of the map and the rest is just unused space. Gridfall is a mode where you only have one life but have some respawns available to you, the arena is made of tiles that fall away, and the idea is to be the last person standing. The most fun modes come from the team-based modes in the form of Carnado and Stockpile. Carnado is a mode where there is a giant tornado in the middle of the arena and is as fun as it sounds.

You can hold a maximum amount of gears that you get from damaging opponents. The catch is that your car holds all the points, to cash those points you have to drive into the Carnado to destroy it and bank the gears. Carnado actually feels very engaging due to the constant tug of war and is miles above Mayhem and Gridfall, in my opinion.

Stockpile is another fun mode which is effectively Capture and Control. You go on foot to collect the gears and run through a gauntlet of vehicles to one of the three banks around the map. Stand on a bank to deposit gears and claim it for your team. The team with the most banked gears at the end wins. Again, this is the most fun due to the same reasons as Carnado. Constant tug of war. Meanwhile, the other modes just feel like you either do the wrecking or constantly get wrecked the entire match.  

Graphics/presentation

This is one area where the game shines. The art style is great and looks very crisp on my 24-inch 4k monitor. The graphics are very solid, although you do get frame drops when things get crazy (I’d guess as low as 50, maybe 48; sorry, I don’t have a tool for console FPS monitoring).  The menus are stylish and snappy, the character selection screen is great, and the character models are great.

The animation work is also quite solid and every inch of the presentation feels well thought out with genuine passion put into it. DAS knows what it wants to be and runs with it fantastically. One thing that it really lacks, however, are the skins. There aren’t many skins and what little there are seems to lack variety and are just lame.

Sound

The overall sound quality is great and of high quality. The cars sound great, the voice actors are rather good, and the commentators are solid. There are also some minor details I really admire, such as when in the character select screen, certain elements of the BGM change depending on who you choose. Every character dynamically changes the background theme, Blue Fang, for example, adds a metal twang to the BGM with its distorted guitar, others add an oriental layer, and so on. It’s a very subtle and minor detail but it’s one of the things that makes DAS shine. Those subtle touches really add to it, and combined with solid in-game sounds, this is a great package on the audio front.

Dualsense Usage

The game does not do much here but what it does, it does very well. The L1 trigger, aka the brake, feels very resistant, and the acceleration trigger does nothing until your car is damaged, then there’s a rumble that conveys the poor state of the car; as it shakes about on the screen, you feel that in your hands. I did hope the accelerate trigger would have different states for different acceleration levels, but what is here is solid.

Conclusion

Destruction All Stars has a very solid foundation. It knows what it wants to be and every aspect of it feels very confident and well-done because of it. However, the gameplay, while well done for what is there, feels lacking and the reason for the level grind is also lacking. For a game that was going to be £70, I would expect more meat on its bones. The content to unlock is minimal and not really fitting for a multiplayer game that’s sold at a one-off price or as a F2P title, they’re also very poor in quality on top of being small in quantity.

The gameplay, as mentioned before, just lacks something. It feels like all the parts to make something special are there, the game is definitely fun, and I will boot it up every now and then after this initial launch. It does, however, need more added to the on-foot and car combat, whether that’s map size tweaks and gauge building tweaks to up the chaos or some fundamental additions to the gameplay such as weapons for the cars and or on foot. There just needs to be more. There is definitely some huge potential here with the wide array of characters and incredibly solid presentation and a strong enough foundation in its gameplay, and with a year’s worth of content planned at a minimum, it could certainly turn into a killer app for the PS5.

As it stands, however, it’s a good enough game but it doesn’t feel like it has any legs. It’s a title any PS5 owner should play, and may well get some good mileage out of, but its long-term appeal is effectively dead on arrival in its current state. 

Lucid games have shown they are very talented and competent, but may still need to mature as a studio. I can feel their passion and I LOVE IT, and how they add to the game in this first years’ worth of content will shape whether the game has legs and likely where their future as a dev studio is. If they manage to pull this year off with DAS, they could see themselves being given much bigger opportunities with Sony. They certainly have the talent for it.

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