Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl review: Almost ready for slime hour

To say that Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is fighting an uphill battle is an understatement. He carries his Super Smash Bros. inspiration firmly on his sleeve by bringing together a host of beloved characters into one platformer, but Nick Brawl does it without the show. While I think it has a lot of heart and is a good fighting game at its core, All-Star Brawl lacks the magic and wonder that Smash Bros. embodies and lacks significant casual appeal.

All-Star Brawl brings together different eras of Nickelodeon cartoons to fight in scenarios based on scenes and locations from various Nicktoons. The list is not complete, but it is diverse enough and reaches several notable eras in its 20 characters. Familiar faces like Ren and Stimpy and RugratsReptar mixes it up with Nigel Thornberry, Zim, and Danny Phantom. Current favorites like Lincoln and Lucy Loud keep the fort for newer toons. Still, the cast has some notable big names too: SpongeBob and his friends, a handful of Ninja Turtles, and the Avatars duo, Aang and Korra, bring much-appreciated star power to the mix.

My favorite part of Nick Brawl is how it plays. You have buttons to jump, attack, special moves, throws and blocks. Your goal is to slap your opponents and increase their damage percentage, making them more likely to fly off the screen when hit with a heavy attack. The characters move quickly, which made me worry that I wouldn’t always feel in control, but the agile and responsive inputs alleviated those concerns in practice. Advanced techniques like wavedashing are surprisingly easy to perform, and thanks to the faster tempo, hitting combos on the fly is a breeze.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s fighting fundamentals make for an enjoyable experience, but there’s not much to fight other than the basics. Standard arcade mode with no story and training are the only content available for single player. Arcade mode rewards you with unlockable art and music to listen to on the Jukebox, but unlocking that content didn’t feel meaningful. You can also take on up to three CPU friends or opponents in custom timed matches or matches where each player has a specified number of lives.

These fights reveal Nick Brawl’s biggest drawback, and that’s the lack of featured content for the party; Here you will not find items or weapons to use in battle. Since its gameplay greatly emphasizes quick reflexes and masterful character control ability, I very much missed having some outrageous contraptions to level the playing field for new or casual players. Stages bring added personality from Nickelodeon licenses and revolutionize battles. Each setting takes place within the Nicktoon world and contains a variety of moving platforms and obstacles to keep players on their toes. These places look great and provide much needed flavor. Some of my favorites include Hi arnoldTraffic Jam inspired by sponge Bob.

All-Star Brawl’s closest party mechanic is a sports mode, a slightly fun feature that splits competitors into two teams where the objective is to hit or throw a ball through the goals placed on the stage. Soccer balls only react to attacks, the plankton-themed ball is heavier and moves slower, and a soccer ball with a hat on it, a cute nod to the leader of Hi arnold – interacts exclusively with grabbing and throwing movements. Sports mode isn’t very exciting diversion from the regular punching fee, but it’s there if you want to try something different.

You can participate in online fights in competitive 1v1 or quick matches, and 12-player lobbies where players can be divided into 2-4 player singles matches. The fight spectator seat is a fantastic addition for tournament organizers or those who want to watch their friends fight for a while. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl features backlink network code, which is designed to smooth animation during online play. However, this implementation is pretty rough. Half of my one-on-one matches had a lot of hangs and stutters outside of the normal recoil frame range. Sometimes rematches against someone with a great connection resulted in a slow, nervous mess; this happened several times when playing online. The four player fights brought out the worst of the online game, with even more freeze and connection issues. I managed to get quite a few good matches with little to no issues, but your mileage can vary online.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a complicated package. His core combat and character attention to detail are great, but everything around him is completely dry. Playing as these adorable Nicktoons may interest some, but I didn’t want to stick around for the no-frills games. Hopefully, Ludosity and Fair Play Labs can keep adding Nick Brawl after launch and build on what’s missing while getting Nickelodeon’s full endorsement to make it a better product for fans.