A joint work of Ludosity studios, Fair Play Labs and GameMill Entertainment that bring us Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, a brawler that promises to give us long hours of fun.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl It is available for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
Admittedly, not everyone can afford to wet Nintendo’s ear and draw a simile to the highly successful franchise Super Smash Bros and come out well standing. Nickelodeon, thanks to its huge repertoire of characters with a great load of nostalgia and great gameplay, could do it.
The Nicktoons multiverse.
The game itself does not have a story of its own, as the goal is merely fun. However, we have a fairly large selection of the greatest characters from Nickelodeon shows. From 90s classics like Ren and Stimpy, Helga from Hey Arnold! o Crawler of the Rugrats; some from the 2000s like SpongeBob, Aang from Avatar or Invader Zim; or from the last decade as Nigel Thornberry, Lincoln from The Loud House or Leonardo from the renewed series of Ninja Turtles.
Making a total roster of 20 fighters, each with their own movements well differentiated from the others. It is not surprising that neither has an advantage over the other. While some movements are quite similar to movements of the Super Smash BrosThe truth is that the game is much faster and more dizzying than this one.
The weak point of history is that there is precisely no history. The single player arcade mode will only take us to fight against a group of random characters. The game needs a final boss. And when they win the last fight, the characters do not have a final story or message, nor a reason to explain why they fight. The matches always start with a bland random message that doesn’t make any sense. We won’t even have some interesting unlockable content as a reward for passing the game. All of this makes the single player gaming experience pretty basic.
Diamond in the rough.
The most remarkable thing about the game is its playability. It is a fast, intuitive game, very easy to learn, but with a high enough difficulty to perfect it. The game can be played in deathmatch mode for lives, for time or a mini game in which a ball must be pocketed through a star.
The artificial intelligence of the enemies is not too challenging, so this game shines more when one plays it online. The experience of playing online is extremely pleasant as the stability of the connection has a very low level of lag and it is very easy to find a competent match.
The main flaw in the gameplay is the lack of adaptation of the character to our tastes, there are no alternative costumes, there are no different fighting styles, there is not even a change of suit color when we fight against the same character (which makes it very cumbersome to fight because they only differ in the color of a small marker on the head, which is confusing). It is also a pity that there are no hidden characters, since some iconic Nick series such as The Curmudgeon Beavers, The Fairly Oddparents, Rocket Power or Jimmy Neutron, among others, have been left out of the selection.
One of lime and one of sand
The graphics of the game are quite good, it is not easy to capture in 3D characters designed in a two-dimensional way. At the same time, the design of the sets is quite congruent with the character shows. Each of the 20 characters has their own setting and we will see some classics like SpongeBob’s “Flying Dutchman” ship, Catdog’s house, the playground set in the ancient west of Rugrats…. A shame that many of these scenarios, which, while visually appealing, are poorly designed. Making one spend more time trying to survive the stage than the opponents.
The worst of the game by far. For starters, the characters are MUTE. We will not hear any sounds made by the characters. No dialogues, no screams, no moans. Absolutely nothing. To make matters worse, it must be added that the soundtrack of each stage is good, but it has nothing to do with the original show it refers to, nor any correlation with the progress of the battle.