Brawlhalla | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the only living being to venture into Valhalla, G.E.M.Simov, a brawler of such renown that I am invited to every WWF event to ever be held, and I will be telling you about “Brawlhalla”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Brawlhalla is a game that is so heavily inspired by Nintendo’s “Super Smash Bros” that it is essentially just a version of that game for the Personal Computer. It features a vast roster of Characters with mostly unique “movesets”, with the Player picking one of those Characters and fighting anywhere from one to three other Players who have picked one of the Characters in an arena that features a large number of bottomless pits.
The way to win is to knock as many other Players in the bottomless pits as possible, multiple times, and to get knocked into the bottomless pits as few times as possible. The knocking into pits happens via the utilizations of attacks, which are determined by the Character’s moveset and the inputs the Player performs.
The Player Character (PC) moves around with the Left and Right arrow keys, jumps with the Space-bar and drops down platforms with the Down arrow key. The Player can make their Character perform two types of attacks - Heavy Attacks with the X button and Light Attacks with the C button - as well as throw an Item with the V button and Dodge with the Z button.
Throwing works by picking up an Item - which occasionally drop down onto the platforms in the Arena and can be picked up by pressing C while standing close to them - pressing and holding down the throw button, then selecting a direction in which to throw it (with the Arrow Keys) and releasing the throw button. This works with just tapping as well, but the force of the throw is going to be lesser and the direction will be whichever one the PC is facing, or whichever one is currently being inputted via the Arrow Keys.
Dodging works by picking a direction (left or right) and pressing the corresponding Arrow Key and then pressing the Z button. If the Z button is pressed while stationary, the PC will block, which provides them with a shield that has a certain amount of health, breaking and making the PC vulnerable to attacks when that amount of health is taken in damage.
Attacks are varied - there are around eight different types of attack that can be performed while standing on the ground and another eight while in the air. Those sixteen attacks are one of the three movesets that Characters have - one of those movesets is shared among many Characters, as it is the “unarmed” moveset, while the other two are not so common, but they do share some commonalities with other movesets - those being the “weapon” movesets.
The unarmed moveset is the moveset in effect while no weapon item has been picked up. That requires some context - among the items that can drop down in the arena, there are ones that are used once and then there are others that are used for a longer amount of time. The one-time use items range from a bomb, a mine, a boomerang and a spiky ball to a horn which calls a burning “angel” to bring a weapon to the location at which the horn was used.
All the one-time use items are meant to be thrown. The weapons, being the items that get used for longer amounts of time, provide the Player with one of the two possible weapons that their Character uses - in the case of the Character Kor, those would be either Gauntlets or a Mallet.
Upon picking up a weapon, the Character’s moveset changes and all their Attacks become different, as the Character is now using the Weapon. That means that each character has roughly 48 attacks at their disposal.
To perform a desired attack, the Player needs to first press one of the Arrow Keys and then press the attack button, either for a Heavy or Light attack. Additionally, if the Player wants to perform an attack that requires its performing Character to be in the air, the Player will need to first jump. Importantly, the PC can jump twice - once off of a platform and once off of the air itself.
With that said, this is pretty much all there is to it. The game features different arenas that sometimes move, other times are completely stationary, providing slight variations to how the fights go, but everything is mostly the same, nearly exclusively based on the Characters who are picked. The game features incredible amounts of Counter-Picking, in the sense that some Characters are very strong against others, but in truth it also emulates Super Smash Brothers in the sense that there are some Characters who are just “top tier” and are purely way better than most others.
Though, even though that much is said, there is no great set of opportunities to chain combos or to win off of a variety of moves being used - it feels as though the game rewards spamming the same Attack over and over again, and the better the Attack (determined by the Character) the better the Player’s chances of winning.
There is some room of growth, but it depends on learning the game in a manner that is not natural - needing to know how great the range of an attack is, needing to know how much damage the attack does, needing to know whether the attack gets overwritten by other attacks - all of those things are important to know, but there is no natural means of finding out through good trial and error.
That is owed up to the fact that there is neither a tutorial mode, nor is there a training mode. Even when the Player creates a custom room, in which the Player can set everything up, there is no option to drop down a training dummy (or if there is, the game fails horribly at communicating that to the Player) as a result of which there is little room for limit testing and figuring things out. The trial and error that is left for the taking is by playing constantly - which features too many variables for it to be healthy development, as Characters vary greatly.
How do Characters vary greatly, and how do those variations affect the game? Well, every Character has four statistical values - Attack, Speed, Dexterity and Defense. Attack makes one hit harder, speed makes one move faster, dexterity makes one attack hit faster and defense makes one capable of taking more damage.
In addition to the default spread of stats that each Character has, there is also a thing called a “stance”, which allows the Player to increase one of the values at the expense of another, thus slightly altering the statline of their Character. This is helpful for the Player playing the Character, but, again, when it comes to figuring things out while playing against other Characters, it only gets messier.
Overall, this game feels extremely messy - as that’s a good word for it. There’s a plethora of Characters who have different statlines, who also have different movesets, and learning how to deal with them all is very challenging on account of the vast number of options that the Characters seemingly have. Then there’s the additional variation of the stances modifying stats and making certain Characters, who are supposed to be weak in one regard, less puny in that regard.
I might have opted to not mention some things - such as the fact that the more a Character gets hit, the harder they get hit, as every hit sends a Character flying backwards, and the more a Character has been hit, the further back they go flying as they get hit - but the important elements of the game have been presented.
And that appears to be enough to convey what the game is, whilst also laying down the foundation upon which the problems of Brawlhalla can be presented.
Brawlhalla is a very casual game, and it is best when played with friends in either local conditions, such as at a party, or when played over voice-chat. When played in such a manner, the game is great fun. However, when played in any other manner, the game changes entirely. Folks who play online games that feature competition get really into the competitive aspect.
When the game not only grants greater rewards to the winner, but also presents the losers in a very undignified and even unpleasant light, while providing the winner with a platform to “rub it in” via the utilization of “victory poses” or “emotes”, the competition goes from being friendly to being cutthroat.
Due to the presence of tier lists, and due to the presence of a ranked mode, Players will do their best to win at all costs, abusing the most powerful Character that is currently available to the best of their abilities. However, due to the fact that most things related to Characters are locked behind a “Character Level”, which requires that the Character be played for a decently gratuitous amount of time to maximize, the Players who need to level that Character up - so as to gain access to stances - will not play on the Ranked mode, and will instead go to the casual lobbies to sweat profusely and ruin the fun of anyone playing for enjoyment OR for anyone still unversed in the game.
That’s doubly troublesome when one considers that there is no tutorial, nor is there anything to guide a new Player in how said Player gets to progress. What is worse is that the way matchmaking works is dreadful - oftentimes Players who have played less than ten hours will get matched with Players who have more than one hundred hours in the game, which leads to a horrendous curb-stomp, which is very likely to dissuade the new Player from playing the game any more.
But the game’s issues do not stop there. Not only is every Character outfitted with 40 levels (each requiring more experience than the previous, leading to levels being obtained once every 10 or 20 matches), but every Character costs a certain number of coins. The Player gains coins every time they play a match, but the quantity is so meager that it is not unlikely to be forced to go through 50 matches so that one may be able to buy a new Character.
And, naturally, winning the matches awards more coins, as a result of which finding the most powerful strategy is incentivized, which leads to phenomena such as “cheesing”, which leads to less fun being had by the Players on the receiving end of the “cheese”.
There is also a Battle-Pass system, featuring countless tasks to complete, and an Account level, which is even slower at increasing than Character Levels. In a sense, Brawlhalla tries doing the right thing when it comes to giving Players an incentive to play the game, but the amount of time that it asks the Players to invest is far too great, especially when one considers just how meager the rewards are.
The monetization system is agreeable, but it severely diminishes the value of the things the Player unlocks by playing and leveling up a certain Character - if I were to unlock the red color for Kor, and I were to buy a skin, I cannot have that skin in red, it’s just the skin.
The game can be very fun under the right circumstances, but it fails in many regards when the stars are not aligned. There is a foundation that can be considered sturdy enough for enjoyable gameplay, but it is weighed down by, at best, sloppy decisions. Even the additional game modes - such as the Weekly Brawl of the Experimental 1v1 - are plagued by the same issues that plague the basic gamemode.
Oddly enough, it also has a “replay” function that saves replays automatically, piling up files on the Player’s PC. Those are very tiny, but the fact that there is no option to turn that off is very strange.
Overall, Brawlhalla is a decent gameplay experience, but it is not exceptional in the slightest. 2/3
Presentation
This game attempts to appear stylized, as it is a 2D game, featuring up + down as well as left + right, with no front and rear, and it makes use of 2D Character Sprites. Everything looks as though it is hand drawn, but the game has a very particular style to it. Characters have unseemly hands and feet, which are such due to their massie size - which is probably done in an attempt to provide greater clarity to the Players - but it has an impact on the aesthetic appearance of the Characters.
Almost all of them look ugly, or, if not ugly, then at least uncanny in an unpleasant manner. There are a few merry exceptions, such as the aforementioned Kor, who is a stone-man, or Rayman (from Rayman), who does not have arms and legs, as a result of which him just having big hands and feet is totally fine with his appearance.
Strangely enough, the game’s arenas feature some very pleasant backgrounds which are actually beautiful. The arenas themselves are simple geometric shapes, slightly stylized to fit the background’s theme, but they’re not ugly and they do their job well enough.
In regards to the game’s audio, there is a large number of musical tracks, roughly one per arena, which sound passable. There are no truly impressive ones, but then there are also no truly bad ones, as a result of which they do their job of being ambience for the fights well enough.
Sound effects perform a bit less admirably, though they are there and they work, even if it feels as though most things sound quite similar to each other - getting hit by a fist and by a hammer sounds pretty much the same.
Now, unfortunately, the game has some massive issues. Number one, as mentioned before - there is no tutorial. There is no indication as to what the game’s controls are, aside from the menu where the Player can see the control schemes (though they cannot be changed). In addition to that, not only does the game fail to tell the Player almost anything, it also does not present what little information it does give to the Player well - there is no means of seeing how much experience points the Account has.
The User Interface, overall, looks off. There’s something about the menus that’s just lacking, whether it be button placement or button highlights - because there are multiple instances of things being highlighted in a certain manner and not being buttons, and then things being highlighted in the same manner and being buttons.
Lastly - and perhaps most major - the game is choppy. It feels as though there is an unreasonable amount of input lag when navigating the menus, and when a match boots up, there’s a very high chance that the framerate of the game will alternate between being pleasantly smooth and eye-rendingly not, though the gameplay itself seems unaffected by this. Still, this occurs without rhyme or reason, and that’s very problematic, because the game’s consistency is even more damaged by that - on top of that, being unable to maintain a consistent framerate on a machine that more than quadruples your recommended system requirements is a very bad sign for how well optimized it is.
The game presents itself well enough, but then it drops the ball and does everything else that is related to presentation dreadfully. 1/3
Story
There is no story. There is, however, Ezio from Assassin’s Creed and also Rayman from… Rayman. Unlike the game this is inspired from, which is Super Smash Bros, there is no story - neither a story mode, nor a story at all. It’s just goons who fight.
But then, actually, tucked away in the menus, the Player can find 4 to 5 paragraphs of text regaling the story of each Character (called Legends) as well as two quotes loosely related to them. What is present is interesting enough, but it is not sufficient to bump the grade any higher than where it is. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? No. The game has so many failings that make it an unpleasant experience in so many regards that even the fun stuff is not, actually, fun. For Pete’s sake, one can’t even do anything in regards to their video settings - it does not remember what window size it was set to in a previous session! 0/1
Conclusion
4/10. Brawlhalla is a passable game to play with one’s friends, and not much else. It might scratch whatever itch a Super Smash Brothers Player has, as a result of not having access to a Nintendo Console, but it fails to satisfy in most regards.
In the bag of mediocrity it goes. May it gather enough dust to fill out its cracks!