To say that the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is fighting an uphill battle is an understatement. It carries its Super Smash Bros. inspiration tightly up its sleeve by uniting a variety of popular characters into one platform fighter, but Nick Brawl does so without the spectacle. While I think it has a lot of heart and is a good fighting game at its core, All-Star Brawl misses the magic and wonder that Smash Bros. embodies and lacks.
All-Star Brawl brings together different eras of Nickelodeon cartoons to battle on stages based on scenes and locations from different Nicktoons. The list is not comprehensive, but it is diverse enough and encounters several notable eras in its 20 characters. Familiar faces like Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats“Reptar confuses it with Nigel Thornberry, Zim and Danny Phantom. Current favorites like Lincoln and Lucy Loud hold the position for newer toons. Still, the cast has some notable big names too: Spongebob SquarePants and Friends, a handful of Ninja Turtles, and the duo Avatare, Aang and Korra, bring some highly respected star powers to the mix.
My favorite part of Nick Brawl is how it plays. They have buttons for jumping, attacking, special moves, throwing and blocking. Your goal is to hit your opponents and increase their damage percentage so that they are more likely to fly off the screen in a strong attack. The characters move quickly, which is why I was concerned that I wouldn’t always feel in control, but the snappy and responsive inputs eased those worries in practice. Advanced techniques like wave washing are surprisingly easy to perform, and the faster tempo makes performing combos a breeze.
The battle basics of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl make the experience enjoyable, but other than the basics, there isn’t much to battle. A standard arcade mode with no story or training is the only single player content available. Arcade mode rewards you with unlockable art and music for you to hear on the jukebox, but unlocking that content didn’t feel useful. You can also take on up to three friends or CPU opponents in custom timed matches or battles in which each player has a certain number of lives.
These fights reveal Nick Brawl’s biggest downside, and that is a lack of celebrity party content; You won’t find any items or weapons here to use in battle. With his gameplay placing a heavy emphasis on quick reflexes and masterful character control skills, I sorely missed having some outrageous gadgets to level the playing field for new or casual gamers. Stages offer additional personality from the Nickelodeon licenses and stagger battles. Each stage is set in a nicktoon world and contains a number of platforms and moving obstacles to keep the players busy. These places look great and offer much-needed flavor. Some of my favorites are that Hey arnold
The closest party mechanic to All-Star Brawl is a sports mode, a slightly fun feature that divides competitors into two teams whose goal is to hit or throw a ball through gates distributed around the stage. Soccer balls only respond to attacks, the plankton-themed ball is heavier and moves slower, and a soccer ball with a hat on it – a cute nod to leadership Hey arnold – only interacts with gripping and throwing movements. Sports mode isn’t a very exciting change from the regular fistfight tariff, but it’s there when you want to try something different.
You can play battles online in 1v1 competitive or rapid combat scenarios and in 12-player lobbies where players can break out into individual 2-4-player matches. The Fight Watch Seat is a fantastic addition for tournament organizers or those who want to watch friends scramble for a while. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl has rollback netcode designed to smooth out animation during online play. However, this implementation is pretty crude. Half of my one-on-one matches had lots of freezes and stutters outside of the normal range of rollback frames. Sometimes rematches against someone with a good connection resulted in a nervous, slowed-down mess; This happened several times while playing online. Four player strikes brought out the worst of the online game, with even more freezes and connection issues. I’ve managed to have some good games with little to no problems, but your mileage may vary online.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a complicated package. The core fight and love of character detail are great, but everything around it is bone dry. Some may be interested in how to play these lovable nick toons, but I didn’t want to stick with the no-frills matches. Hopefully Ludosity and Fair Play Labs will be able to expand Nick Brawl further after launching and specifying what’s missing while getting Nickelodeon’s full support to make it a better product for the fans.
