Super Smash Flash

Tons of effort and gameplay, just not that fun

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

I’ll start by saying this much- the actual time and effort spent in making this game is absolutely sick. This is a near feature-perfect replication of Smash Brothers Melee on the gamecube. It’s got the characters, the items, the stages, the modes, just about anything you could think of. Except the gameplay.

This game deserves so much credit for the amount of stuff packed into it. It’s got a one player mode, complete with classic mode, adventure mode (and eventually all-star), target tests, and training mode. If that’s not enough you can go into versus mode and fight your friend under any number of conditions like stock, time, item selection, and custom damage ratio. While playing the game will track fight bonuses and stats. The character roster includes a full 28 characters, with 13 available from the start. Each character is complete with their own move set, sprites, and sound effects.

The graphics and sound are nice, but I can’t rate them too highly simply because almost nothing here is original. I don’t doubt that ripping them all and creating the custom stages took time, but every sprite you see is something that was taken from an existing sprite sheet, some original and some custom. Same with the sound, just about everything here can be found in the melee sound test- except of course for the sounds of the characters that didn’t exist in melee. The announcer voice provided by Kagome is a nice touch though. The custom graphics for the menus are slick and do a good job of mimicking the melee menus. However the drawings/animations that have been added on to the characters to represent their special moves are usually quite bad. But I can excuse it for a one-man game of this size, as it really doesn’t affect the gameplay.

Speaking of gameplay, that’s where the game falls terribly short. The controls are simple enough- move jump and attack. However the physics, movement, and AI programming hardly even work. I decided to take captain falcon through classic mode, as he’s my favorite character from melee. My first match was against Sonic. The first thing I realized is that the vertical left and right movement is pretty broken- when moving back and forth the character will have about a 10-20 pixel gap in between stances. Sonic just started running around and trying to attack me, but never really did any damage. I walked around a little bit and he just jumped off the screen. As I went through the stages the AI seemed pretty hit-and-miss. Sometimes it would come after me and knock me off, sometimes it would just stand there and start doing the same move over and over. All that I really ever had to do to win a match though, was just walk toward the cpu and start mashing the attack button. My opponent would usually fly off the screen in a couple hits. I thought this was maybe because I was playing on easy mode, but the same thing often happened to me. For some reason one single hit would send me to my death. The minigames like target test and race to the finish were good ideas, but the game’s floaty physics make them more of a chore than something fun. Sometimes matches would end almost as soon as they started, with cpu opponents apparently killing themselves or something. I’m not exactly sure. I tried the game with a few different characters and the results were pretty much the same for all.

If Cleod had spent a fraction of the time used to make this game on building a better engine, as opposed to cramming in as much stuff as possible, this game could have been awesome. It’s like someone put a piece of tracing paper on top of Smash Brothers Melee, traced every last detail they could, but did it with a broken pencil. As it stands though, Super Smash Flash is simply a buggy and flawed attempt at recreating one of the best fighting games of all time. Not that it’s fair to compare though, considering flash and consoles can’t even be held on the same level for production values (well, usually). Like I said, if this flash only had a few characters and stages, but was actually fun to play, it could have been incredible. I know you’ve got the skills Cleod, focus them next time.


Click here to play Super Smash Flash






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