Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid (Xbox One)

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid released in a rather rough state, but this was a bit of a necessary evil. Despite this 3-on-3 2D fighting game having some capable fighting game pros guiding its development, many players were reasonably skeptical of a tie-in game to a costumed superhero show that hadn’t had the best games in the past. Released at a budget price, the original version featured only nine playable characters, few play modes, no voice acting, and weak visual effects, but once the money came in from the early sales, more love could be put into the product. Bugs were fixed, characters and modes added, and voices and flashy visuals that match the shows were implemented, making the game not only a more fitting tribute to Power Rangers’s 25th Anniversary, but it allowed the always enjoyable action at the heart of the game to finally have a polished presentation that suits it.

 

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is a tag team fighting game where each player puts together a team of three characters. To win a match, all three members of the opponent’s team must have their life depleted or you must have more total health when the match timer runs out, but the teammates aren’t merely extra lives. While fighting with one character, you can call in either of your reserve characters to perform an attack, this giving you a special attack option outside of what your current fighter is capable of. Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid tries to balance appealing to both casual and advanced players by having the attacks you perform be relatively simple, consisting usually of just a button press and direction. This means all your attacks, even your special moves, can be easily utilized at any time, but a greater focus is instead put on successfully linking together attacks so that your opponent is too busy taking damage to properly retaliate. Combos can become incredibly large, totaling over 50 hits at times, so long as you come to understand which attacks will properly juggle a foe and leave them open to another hit, but even a novice can usually find at least a few quick attack strings since a character’s full move set is easy to experiment with.

What’s more, calling in those assists also allows for more than just a single attack added to the chain. You can swap in the next fighter after their assist attack and then immediately begin fighting with them, meaning you can fluidly go from executing a combo with one fighter and hand it off to continue it with someone whose advantages are entirely different. This gives a bit more importance on how you craft your team as they aren’t simply three fighters who will fight in a row, many of them having a distinct feel to them to make their options and strategies clear. Kat Manx from Power Rangers S.P.D. has a clear focus on quick strikes and rushing down foes but can also perform a flip to move to the other side of the opponent to set up combos or avoid danger. The Mastodon Sentry from the Shattered Grid comics leans heavily into projectile action and traps with their attacks but such advantageous attacks are usually limited across the cast either with long start-ups, weak damage, or a recovery time after the blow, and the Push Block maneuver even allows a defending player to continue advancing when hit by an attack so that a character like the Sentry has a range advantage but not to an oppressive degree. Udonna the Mystic Force White Ranger has attacks that can freeze opponents so you can get a clean set-up for an attack string, and Gia Moran in her pirate inspired Yellow Super Megaforce Ranger outfit mixes her long and short range options thanks to strong swordplay and her musket-inspired blasters.

 

The base roster of Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid contains 12 characters now including villains like the monstrous Goldar and a good deal of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers representation with its Red and Green Ranger present as well as alternate versions of the Yellow, White, Black, and Pink Rangers, but future releases like the Mega Edition and Super Edition include the DLC fighters to increase that number. 14 downloadable characters are available for purchase if you bought the original version, and they continue to bring new ideas to the table. Poisandra, a rather silly villain from Power Rangers Dino Charge, fights by utilizing her husband Sledge and pulling goofy pranks like explosive cakes. The more serious Dai Shi from Power Rangers Jungle Force can cling to the screen edge and dominate the air with his slashes, and in a cute reference to the mobile game Power Rangers Legacy Wars, a crossover tie-in with Street Fighter means Ryu and Chun-Li join the roster utilizing move sets akin to their home series. While people who bought the base game might be a little bummed they have to pay more to bulk up the roster to a hearty 26, even if you stick with the standard version, you can encounter the DLC characters both in the Arcade mode’s sequence of battles or the Story Mode, the story allowing you to sample a few like Time Force Pink Ranger Jen Scotts and Trey of Triforia from Power Rangers ZEO.

 

While some favoritism towards the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series is expected and they do still occupy a good amount of the roster slots, the battle arenas, additional characters, and even elements of the story try to make sure it is a wider celebration of the series, the game not even shying away from the less loved and more serious 2017 Power Rangers film by having Cenozoic Blue as part of the core roster and an arena based on that primordial ranger’s origins. Corinth from Power Rangers RPM is a stage and the scientist Doctor K from that series has a brief role in the plot despite not being a ranger, and there’s a comeback mechanic where players build up energy to summon Zords (or a giant Goldar) to assist them if they’ve taken considerable amount of damage. Most of the assistance comes in the form of quick but massive attacks and there is again a bit of a greater presence for Mighty Morphin in the form of the traditional Megazord, the Dragonzord, and giant Goldar, but the Samurai Megazord can give your attacks special effects and the S.P.D. Megazord can inflict status effects to help you or hinder the other fighter. This comeback mechanic isn’t too disruptive and easy to see coming and you can even sacrifice energy for it to perform special counters instead, making it a fine inclusion and one that includes a part of the series that might not have otherwise seen representation beyond some background visuals.

So far, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid has offered much of what a series fan would want to see and what a player of a tag-team fighter would like to experience, the polish completed over time definitely showing as battles have plenty of series-appropriate sparks accompanying attacks and little touches to make the game feel faithful. What feels a little less thought out though is the game’s story mode. Expecting some familiarity with the source material, the plot begins in an alternate universe where Tommy Oliver, the Green Ranger who initially worked with the evil sorceress Rita Repulsa to fight the rangers, never had his change of heart. Instead of turning good, he sinks deeper and deeper into evil, using the Morphin Grid that all Power Rangers draw power from to utilize their powers and weapons to track them down and take away their morphers. The main motivation seems to be just a plain power play, a bid for the newly christened Lord Drakkon to increase his power and remove the potential opposition. From there it’s mostly a lot of world and time hopping to save rangers or stop the forces of Lord Drakkon, and while there’s a wrinkle here or there that makes it a little less straightforward, it works mostly as an excuse to set up some battles that unfortunately feature the Mastodon Sentry a bit too often as an enemy. Some nice touches do exist in how these battles are set-up, the player getting to be the villain at times when they’re meant to win a fight and on occasion rather than getting a team of three you might have a character feature multiple health bars instead, but it’s a pretty plain crossover tale that seems to be a simplified adaptation of the Shattered Grid event from the Power Rangers comic books.

 

Arcade mode is the other main source of single-player content and it’s a sequence of mostly story-free battles, the fights being pretty straightforward until the final two where they are built from Lord Drakkon’s forces. The leader of your team of three will have a bit of dialogue with the villains but not to a particularly interesting degree, but at least if you pick Lord Drakkon you get to see him have an appreciably different ending since he can’t exactly overthrow himself. Both single-player modes mostly feel like a good excuse to present some battles to participate in and could have been a good way to come to grips with the battle system before you start playing the multiplayer with other humans in-person or online, but there is one area that Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid’s many changes over time hurt. The AI for computer controlled characters seems to be skewed towards putting up a powerful fight for professional fighting game veterans, meaning if you have it set to normal, you can actually find yourself juggled in those long 50 hit combos that can wipe out your health bar. The mode doesn’t seem to influence how “normal” they are as they will put up a mean fight even in the introductory story chapter or worse, in the tutorial where you’re trying to learn things like the Zord counter but your opponent, the grappler Dragon Armor Trini, keeps going for unblockable grabs as set-ups for combos. Easy difficulty is a considerable step down, perhaps making fights a bit too easy at times, but they can still receive random sparks of inspiration and perform a long combo so they’re not hopeless either. It does mean there’s not much of a sweet spot for a fresh player trying to train up with the game’s systems, but Easy can at least help them find some of their footing even if the jump up to Normal feels a bit too steep.

THE VERDICT: Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid managed to clean itself up into something presentable and entertaining after a rather weak state at launch, the characters feeling distinct and having fluid and flashy combos that value learning attack sequencing rather than technical inputs. The 3-on-3 fights can be exhilarating as you try to execute your attack string and properly counter the unique tricks different rangers and team compositions can bring, but the AI being skewed towards professionals even at its lower settings makes the learning process a bit rough and uninviting. The single-player modes are fine as a tribute to the series history and provide a good enough batch of solo fights to try out despite their basic plot, but once you’ve got the core fighting systems down, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid provides an energetic multiplayer experience that makes it easier to forgive what flaws weren’t fully polished out.

 

And so, I give Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. Like many fighting games, finding someone around your skill level to help develop your abilities against is when Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid will feel at its best, and the ranked online at least allows you to potentially find people in that niche once it has a good sense of your capabilities. It is a bit of a shame the single-player options don’t have the best skews though, the difficulty needing a true “normal” middle-ground so you can go from learning the game to building up character knowledge and finally to fighting with the understanding that either side might be able to pull off attack strings long enough to fully wipe out a character. Some experience with past tag fighters like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 almost seems expected despite the attack inputs being designed around easy understanding and accessibility, but once you get over some of the learning hump, the fights are entertaining and the right systems are in place to keep things fair. Assist characters can only be called so often and can be hurt when they pop in to attack, the Zords are only meant to help ailing players so they don’t help anyone win more and they’re often easy enough to predict, and characters tend to have clear focuses which makes it so you can meaningfully swap in a fighter to try and counter another. While this is a review of the base game rather than one of the content-rich rereleases, buying the Super Edition and getting all the extra characters still feels a worthwhile purchase provided you’re sure you can get involved in the multiplayer portion of the experience. A story mode that balanced the characters it featured and told a stronger story could have made that a more compelling reason to purchase the full package, but just like back in its early release, the feel of the gameplay is what remains the core draw while the aesthetic touches still ensure this isn’t just a Power Rangers game in name only.

 

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid still feels like a redemption story even if part of that redemption involved throwing the AI out of whack.  The game feels fully featured now and serves as a better host for its intelligent battle system focused on smart combo strings and hand-offs. You can tell fighting game professionals had a hand in making it, that mostly a good thing because its systems hold together well, but after this game overcame its growing pains it also added a few for people just starting out with it. That may mean young Power Rangers fans might be in for a surprise, but the love and attention to detail shown to the broader series and how easy to understand move sets can be linked together into incredibly complex combos means Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid feels both like a proper fighting game and a faithful Power Rangers experience.