I’ve had some shitty online multiplayer experiences in my life, but Super Smash Bros. for Wii U takes the cake.
People complain about lag all the time, and yet I rarely encounter it. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare? Online generally played smooth as butter. Battlefield 4? Flawless connections. Street Fighter 4? Barely any latency issues. Super Smash Bros. 4? I can’t play three fucking matches in a row without the game turning into a literal slideshow.
The Nintendo network is complete trash. Seriously, peer-to-peer connectivity as bad as the kind Nintendo is allowing for should be illegal. I hope anyone who worked in R&D on the online portion of this game stubs their toe tonight. Seriously, screw Nintendo. And I’m even angrier that I like the game enough to keep playing it, because that means I have to continually suffer more unplayable online matches.
Hell, I’ll make this my review of Super Smash Bros. Wii U, because it pretty much sums up my feelings on the game. It’s a great package with loads of content, 8-player smash is a particularly impressive addition, and the new characters are solid (Megaman and Shulk are particularly kick-ass, although they practically ruined Sonic with obscure buffs and critical nerfs), but the biggest component of the game, the online play, sucks to an irredeemable degree. In a fighting game that supports online play, lag like this is past the point of “well, I still think that game is a 9/10 overall”. No, because this entire portion of the game is pretty much broken, I would say that 7.5/10 is the highest you could reasonably give Super Smash Bros. 4, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of it is just a re-skin of Brawl.
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