Why The Fuck is Nobody Reviewing Brawlhalla?

Some years ago I had to beg various employers to let me write about Warframe, because nobody seemed to give a fuck and the few media outlets that did, mostly did a shit job at reviewing the game properly. "It's too weird", "it's got no content", "it's just another F2P title". Yeah well...

It's currently topping GTA V in the god damn Steam charts, you stupid cunts!

By the time someone was finally smart enough to let me do a proper review about the whole thing, most other magazines already spent their 20something minutes looking at it, telling people it was nothing special. The game has its own annual fan convention, peaked at over 120k consecutive Steam users a couple weeks ago (not including users of the standalone client or the console versions) and keeps getting bigger and more popular by the day, but hey, let's not fucking cover it, because it's certainly nothing special.

I'm currently noticing something similar about another indie gem, which is certainly never going to be as big as Warframe, but it's easily one of the most popular fighting games on Steam - and has been consistently popular for as long as it's been around: Brawlhalla.

Right, let's get the obvious crap out of the way - that trailer looks a bit shit. You can tell there's a small team with an even smaller budget behind this game when you look at it. But here's the thing: Brawlhalla maintains a steady 9-12k consecutive player peak day after day. For comparison, here's a massively overhyped Street Fighter V struggling to maintain 1,500 consecutive users, with Mortal Kombat X having even fewer users and Killer Instinct may as well not exist at this point. Same for Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and the latest KoF. To be fair, I can't tell how well these fighters are doing compared to Brawlhalla on consoles. One may also argue that Brawlhalla is simply a different type of fighting game and can't really compare to these other titles, but Brawlhalla's main game mode is all about 1vs1 ranked matches, it's a 2D competitive fighting game and you can go suck it.

Here's my character punching 3 other players at the same time. I'm still losing, but I'm doing it with style.

You can tell straight away that Brawlhalla is closer to Smash Bros. than it is to Street Fighter. And there are snobs arguing about whethter Smash Bros. should even be a thing at fighting game tournaments, because it's more "noob friendly" or some shit. Because a fighting game can only be good if it requires you to memorize 38 button combos in order to stay competitive. I'm sure the folks competing for the $100,000 prize pool at the Brawlhalla World Championship really care about what you think.

So yes, at first glance this game shamelessly rips off Smash Bros. You get your triple jump, walljump, your light and heavy attack, then weapons, bombs and other shit will spawn in the arena and players use them to weaken the other fighters, hoping to smack them off the screen to score a point. It's the Smash formula minus the popular Nintendo characters and, sadly, minus any decent music. Seriously, the one thing that genuinely bothers me about this game is its dull soundtrack.

Some of the more boring characters look like something out of an old Penny Arcade strip.

Brawlhalla seems deceptively simple at first. Each playable legend (read: character) uses two out of the 11 weapon types in the game. At the beginning of a match you'll be using only your fists. Weapons will spawn into the arena a few moments later, then combatants start hacking and slashing away at each other with claws, swords, axes and all that sort of thing. Each weapon and fighting style has its own strengths and weaknesses, they all come with their own range, damage and speed. In a nutshell, you use light attacks to weaken other players, then finish them off with a heavy attack. These vary depending on your weapon and character of choice and whether you use neutral attacks or use them whilst jumping or in combination with a directional input.

Getting into it is really easy. But it'll take lots of practice to get the right distance and timing in order to counter each fighting style. Ideally, you'll slowly go from spamming random attacks to leaping all over the arena whilst kicking people off the screen left, right and center, throwing your weapon at them to finish them off, then picking it back up mid-flight. You can do some seriously cool shit on there.

It's not as Viking-themed as the title may imply.

You can compete in the aforementioned ranked 1vs1 matches in order to unlock cosmetic weapon and character skins and colours and ranks for bragging rights. There's also ranked and friendly 2vs2, free for all brawls for 4 players and custom matches for up to 8 people. There are 30something legends available right now, ranging from vikings to pirates to ninjas and medieval knights and there's also a gangster and a cowgirl and a minotaur and a lizardman and about a bazillion alternative skins and appearances for each legend. You can turn just about every legend into a mecha-version, a dark elf, a zombie, an anthropomorphic animal or some other crazy thing if you dislike their default appearance. There are unlockable colours and fighting styles, which may make your legend a bit tougher, lets them attack harder or swing their weapons faster at the cost of some other stat. There's a ton of customization in Brawlhalla. Granted, much of that cosmetic stuff costs real money, but I'd rather spend a fiver or two in order to customize my favourite character in an otherwise free game than spend 60 Bucks on fucking Street Fighter V, then 40 on the fucking season passes, then another 8 per fucking costume and then I still only get half a game.

Brawlhalla is free. There's a rotation of free trial legends, which changes frequently. There's also a practice mode, which lets you experiment with every legend for as long as you want before you decide to unlock them. You can do so simply by playing the game and earning ingame currency. Alternatively, you can throw some real money at the screen and get any character you want for pennies. Or buy the All Legends Pack and get every single current and future character unlocked for life, which will cost you $20 or whatever the fuck people in your country use in exchange for videogames.

Free for all brawls are a bit of a pointless clusterfuck. Just how I like it!

Brawlhalla is currently sitting on nearly 55,000 user reviews, 85% of which are positive. The game came out of early access a couple weeks ago and is mostly ignored by the games press for some inexplicable reason. If you like fighting games at all and you're not completely put off by the cartoony visuals, give Brawlhalla a go. It's seriously good.