I used to love Power Rangers, yo! I stuck with it long after the other kids had outgrown it and after growing up, I watched a few of the Japanese series(Gekirangers is all kinds of amazing and Shinkenger is flippin' brilliant!). I've always had a thing for characters that could transform, so the Sentai series has always been right up my alley. Color me surprised when a new 3-on-3 fighting game based on the franchise was announced, although color me a bit disappointed when it was announced as digital only. Regardless, I made my pre-order, and now Power Rangers - Battle for the Grid is finally in my hands!
The game offers a few basic modes: Online VS(Ranked and Casual), Offline Versus Player or CPU, Training, Tutorial and Arcade modes. It's very basic, and there aren't many options. You can't tweak the AI's difficulty setting, you can't add rounds to a match, there's basically nothing. The tutorial is horrible, only going through the basic and skipping over some of the game's mechanics, which is a huge mistake. The Arcade Mode is a 7-stage slog that has about 4 written lines of dialogue total, culminating in a battle against Lord Drakkon. Lame. What makes Arcade so bland is the fact that there are only 9 characters total, Lord Drakkon being excluded since he is the final boss, so you end up fighting the same characters over and over and over again. Be warned, at least on the Switch version, loading times are a bit on the longer side.
Still, the game's biggest blunder is its roster. Let's hope you liked Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, because we get: Tommy Oliver as both the Green Ranger and Lord Drakkon, from the comics, Jason Scott Lee, Kimberly as the Ranger Slayer(Don't worry, there's a skin to revert her to the show's look), Goldar and, finally, we get the comics' exclusive Black Ranger Trooper, which is grunt wearing a suit based off of Zack's. That's six characters that appeal to Mighty Morphin' fans. The other three are Magna Defender, from Lost Galaxy(Another classic series), Kat from SPD and Gia from MegaForce, thank god. And, in case you haven't noticed, there's not a single Blue Ranger. Leaks show that the upcoming three characters are the White Ranger, from Mystic Force(Praise the gods) and... another Jason Scott, from the Zeo era. The pandering is real. Official in-game art suggests that the third character is the Black Dragon AKA Trini from the comics. For a game that's supposed to celebrate Power Rangers it seems like the developers got stuck with the oldies, which hurts the game. They should've just called it Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and not even bother with other eras. Lastly, there will be DLC costumes, Lord Drakkon Evo II and Mighty Morphin' pink are alright, but Dragon Shield Jason is where it's really at. Sadly, there are only two color schemes per character, and the alternate color sets are rather bland, hopefully they do something about that.
With the worst out of the way, I'm happy to report that the game is actually rather fun to play! The game is played with four different buttons: Weak, Medium and Strong attacks with a fourth button relegated to Special moves. Each character has three different special moves, performed by pressing the fourth button and different directions on the control pad(Neutral, Forward, Backwards and, a fourth special done exclusively on air) as well as an EX move, done by pressing Weak+Special. EX moves tend to go through enemy attacks, but cost 1 energy stock to use. Ah, yes! Of course, we've got a traditional 3-tier energy stock, you can use two stocks to perform a powerful super move or use 3 stocks once a partner has died to summon a powerful Zord, one time per match only though!
You can call in partners to either attack or swap places with you. Benched characters can recover a bit of lost health when tagged out, since this game employs Marvel's trademark red-health. There are a few moves to force your enemy to tag out, as well as you can decide pretty late if you want to tag with a character or just in his assist, since swapping places is done by double tapping the designated assist button. Overall, the combat is fast and fun, making combos is easy and the game is very masher friendly, however, you can pull off some fancy stuff if you're willing to put in the time. That said, there are only 9 characters, and the game is played with 3-person teams, so there's scant 27 different character combinations at the moment, which will get tiresome pretty quickly.
Power Rangers - Battle for the Grid might just be the best Power Rangers game yet, which is not saying much. That said, the bland stages and poor special effects are proof of its relatively low budget, which is a shame, because I'm sure that with a larger budget this game could've been really, REALLY good, even if unremarkable. That said, I'm hoping that with a few extra characters the game might become an easier recommendation, the initial cast is diverse, mechanics-wise, even Lord Drakkon feels different from Tommy, but 9 characters just don't cut it in this day and age. The game is already off to a great start, I hate this 'games as a service' trend, but I'll remain hopeful.
6.5 out of 10
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