Super Dodgeball Beats (PS4)
In many rhythm games with a competitive multiplayer component, the challenge will usually be seeing who can better hit the notes as you both play the same song. Considering how expert timing with button presses is often key to doing well in a rhythm game, it’s not too surprising few games incorporate means of direct interference with the other player, but Super Dodgeball Beats aims to change that. Its rhythm game action is inherently competitive, and while its dodgeball theming actually doesn’t manifest that much in how the rhythm battles unfold, you will find both single player and multiplayer defined by the ways both teams can mess with the other side.
In Super Dodgeball Beats, you will have control four characters on one side of a dodgeball court, each character representing a different face button on your PS4 controller. For the most part, you just need to press triangle, circle, x, or square at the right time for the appropriately placed character, pink shrinking rings appearing at the character’s feet to indicate the timing. There are times you will need to hold down the button instead and then release it with the right timing, and similarly, sometimes you’ll be asked to move the left control stick in a direction based on where the indicator starts and ends. These components aren’t too unusual for a rhythm game, the pink rings a bit of a different way to represent the required timing but it does mean the basics of Super Dodgeball Beats are just about hitting the right notes at the right time, the music meant to help you time the button presses properly. Sometimes the beat won’t be readily apparent until you’ve become a touch familiar with the song though and there are certainly musical tracks that do a better job at syncing up button inputs with the rhythm. Unfortunately, while many songs work as electronic or club music to play along to, not many of them are particularly memorable or unique save for having recognizable enough structures that make it feasible enough to try and master them through repeat plays.
What makes Super Dodgeball Beats about more than just hitting the right notes at the right time are the power-ups. During a match, hitting the proper buttons and in particular doing so as close to perfectly as possible will gradually earn you energy. The energy goes towards granting you a random power-up, and these can range wildly in terms of their effect on the match. Petrification, for example, will prevent the enemy team from earning credit for hitting notes unless they do so perfectly, each of their four characters needing to hit one to break free. However, it’s the more drastic ones that really change how Super Dodgeball Beats feels to play. Normally in a musical dodgeball match, the victor will be determined through a sort of momentum system. A ball in the meter at the top of the screen moves more towards the side that is doing well, a team that can remain consistent moving the ball more towards their portion of the meter. When the song ends, wherever the ball is in the meter will determine the winner or you’ll see a draw declared if it’s in the empty space in the middle. This ends up having a bit of a rough relationship with some power-ups. Doughnut will cover the feet of all four players, making it so you can barely see the incoming pink rings and won’t know when they’re in the right spot unless you think you can match it to the rhythm. Poison, on the other hand, briefly takes two players out of commission, and if you hit any notes with that character during the period, it counts as a miss. Poison can lead to one player hitting a lot more notes in a short period to shift the game in their favor and Doughnut can be used deviously to deny important information and lead to a shift in fortune.
If you are playing multiplayer with another human, such power-up usage can be a fun twist to the action even if some power-ups are far more powerful than others. In fact, you need to gradually unlock the power-ups through the game’s three leagues, your score at the end of a match going towards the unlocks. However, as you unlock more and more, not only do you get some of the more devastating abilities that now both sides can use, you also get a lot of power-up clutter. There are power-ups that steal one if your opponent has it, mimics the power of whatever power was used on you, or heals the effects of a power-up, and while there is some room to try and be strategic by hanging onto these, you won’t be building up energy for more power-ups if you do and the random nature of which one you get means you might be wasting time waiting to heal an attack that never comes. While your opponent might luck into the one power that gives them a huge boost towards their side of the meter, you can be sitting waiting to try and do something tricky with a weak steal power-up that can be hard to use even when it’s relevant since you’re trying to hit notes at the same time. This can make even simpler battles tougher than they might be if all they were are reflex challenges though, and the fourth member of your team will always be one of three mascot characters where your choice will help certain powers appear more often.
The solo play features three leagues of increasing difficulty, each one first having you play against all nine other teams before the teams with the most points move onto a final tournament where you must win three matches to come out on top. Even though some of the music of Super Dodgeball Beats blends together or mostly stands out from each other due to instrumentation, the dodgeball teams are full of colorful characters and have some pretty nice animations during the matches. You play as the Sigma Nerds Club who were essentially press-ganged by a mascot into becoming a dodgeball team but seem pretty gung-ho about it once they realize what the mascot wanted out of them, but other teams can include a trio of retirees dressed up like biker punks, a posh man in a golden Godzilla outfit, some clearly supernatural sorts like a vampiress who has bats serve as her three back-up dancers, and there are even a few “boss” teams of sorts like the alien who fills the extra spots in the team with its tentacles. Only a few of the teams are playable in multiplayer such as the one that is clearly inspired by the protagonists of Metal Slug and they all come with nice associated backgrounds that suit this game’s anime inspirations, even the referee having a good deal of character as he dances at the top of the screen. It’s a bright colorful world with pumping music, but as you get to the harder matches, you start to really realize some of the issues with the particular format of Super Dodgeball Beats.
Since getting the ball into your side of the meter is more a matter of momentum than overall success, it is possible to make a comeback late into a match, and you can always pause and reset if it is too late for that battle. It is wise for there to be a way to comeback if direct competition is a crucial part of Super Dodgeball Beats’s format, but it also means early parts of the match can feel a little superfluous. You might need to play better near the end to succeed and won’t be generating power-ups if you aren’t trying to win from the get-go, but you can just hop in a little later and start from there and still have a hope of winning. At the same time, the right power at the right point in the match can make a team go from perfection to suddenly losing since they can’t see the indicators properly, and when you get to the Legendary level league matches, it can get quite frustrating to know the enemy team won’t even pretend to be affected in the same manner. While having a bouncing mascot head covering parts of your screen can screw you over, the AI opponents play along less and less and it feels like you’re losing matches more to random bad luck than coming up short in your musical knowledge or reactivity. What once made lower difficulty matches feel a bit more competitive becomes grating when it instead holds you back from clearing out tough songs, and what’s worse, even if you head to training to maybe try and master the tracks so you won’t need to worry about being denied information, power-ups remain a mandatory part of training mode despite being almost antithetical to it.
It is fortunate it takes until the third League for the difficulty to really start to feel like it is overly harmed by the power-ups, and the league structure does mean you can settle for ties or even a loss or two and still make it to the tournament finals. The skew in how impactful power-ups can be ends up too strong a factor in whether a match will go well though, this system that can work well for more casual multiplayer contests not a great fit for solo play where it can end up boiling down to replaying the song and hoping you don’t get screwed over during the rougher parts of the rhythm battle.
THE VERDICT: Super Dodgeball Beats’s soundtrack may not include many standout hits but they do their job well as a piece of this rhythm action game. The strange cartoon teams give the game a fun personality to compensate for the many similar music tracks, but the power-ups are what really dominate how the game unfolds. Some power-ups can heavily swing a match and yet they’re random and attempts to use them strategically often harm your own effectiveness, all while the meter system means some matches are determined by the final moments rather than a player’s overall performance. In most of the single player it’s manageable and the multiplayer is more about the fun found in the chaos, but the rough swings some bad luck can cause do impact the feel of a game that’s otherwise all about hitting notes perfectly.
And so, I give Super Dodgeball Beats for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. The increased difficulty of your opponents in Legendary League is the pressure on Super Dodgeball Beats’s systems that exposes their underlying issues. In the lower leagues it’s a lot easier to treat the power-ups as challenges to overcome, the player seeing their own power use as an effective tool and not yet having the polluted item pool that makes the final league so hard. Legendary is essentially the game’s hard mode though, and while it’s difficult to get proper training on any musical track since there’s no clean practice mode, you can at least get fairly far on skill, practice, and trying to play in some slightly tricky ways like holding onto late game power-ups for the right moment. The battle system does feel like it is essentially made for casual multiplayer most of all, the lack of stakes making it easier to laugh off when a clutch use of Poison or Doughnut swings the game, but it still is tied so closely to randomization it can provoke some frustration even in the easier leagues. Power-ups are at least not a constant factor because you must build up energy towards them through proper play, but it does feel like the power-up system needs quite the overhaul if it will always be a mandatory part of the game. Whether it’s having less power-ups so that a match won’t be skewed by one team getting the more passive powers, having a system that lets you build up to stronger power-ups but with more risk for not cashing out sooner, or even just including an optional standard play so you can at least see how a match would go on skill alone, it does feel like Super Dodgeball Beats needs something extra added beyond just a more distinct soundtrack to help push it up to the next level.
Trying to take the typical rhythm game design of pressing buttons perfectly in time with the music and twisting it into something with more direct interference between players does feel like it will inevitably encounter issues. It’s a game style about consistency with inherently inconsistent elements introduced, and it is possible even the system as is could be near to Super Dodgeball Beats truly working. Maybe its the meter system rewarding late play rather than consistency or how there’s nothing in place to prevent a tear of awful or excellent power-ups from either side, but there are at least places where the game can hold together before the effects of clashing systems really bring things down. For a bit of casual fun for friends or some light play in the lower leagues, the interference adds some spice that won’t be found in other rhythm game multiplayer modes, but beyond the colorful characters of its dodgeball teams, it feels like most other parts of Super Dodgeball Beats’s DNA are still in need of a bit more tweaking and testing to find out what really works.