When “Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl” was announced via IGN’s YouTube channel on July 13, the competitive Smash Bros. community was blown away by the trailer’s display of advanced gameplay features.
The game boasted a mechanical prowess akin to the franchise’s 2001 cult classic “Super Smash Bros. Melee,” which since its decades old release has garnered an ever-growing competitive community for good reason.
Unlike any other officially licensed Super Smash Bros. game, “Melee” features an unruly amount of advanced mechanics and techniques. Including wavedashing and dash-dancing, which allow for hyper fast movement, and L-canceling and jump-cancel grabbing, which reduce the time it takes to execute one move after another.
Players soon learned to exploit said techniques as the game increased in popularity, thus developing a fast-paced and highly creative game that is the pinnacle example of community growth through ingenuity.
“Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl,” on the other hand, is a different story.
The game was developed by Swedish independent studio Ludosity after the success of their indie platform fighting game “Slap City,” which was praised for its easy to pick up nature and ridiculous cast of characters.
Just like “Melee,” “Slap City” featured an array of advanced game mechanics that could be used to quicken the pace of the game. It was fun, different and, unlike “Melee,” had official online support.
While “All-Star Brawl” has been praised for its superior online capabilities in comparison to the online mode of Nintendo’s poorly supported “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate,” the pros of the cartoon giant’s dip into video games end there.
Simply put, “All-Star Brawl” is a hot mess through and through.
From a gameplay perspective, “All-Star Brawl” tries to piggyback off the successful mechanics of “Melee,” but fails to execute the clean and precise movement options. The game feels sluggish and clunky at the same time, while the introduction of new mechanics like strong attacks in the air can be both difficult to execute and hard to remember.
The available in-game options are abysmal, with volume adjustments being the only aspect of the settings you can change.
You would assume being able to hear the voices of your favorite beloved Nickelodeon characters such as Aang from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and SpongeBob would be reason enough to want to leave the game audio on, but the best you get is a line of text that contains poorly written references to episodes.
If the pre-fight text wasn’t repetitive enough, the music featured in the game is so mundane you’d be better off muting the audio and listening to an album instead.
The game modes in “All-Star Brawl” are nothing to write home about because “Battle,” “Arcade,” “Extras” and “Online” is all you’re going to get.
While each character in “All-Star Brawl” has a diverse moveset that doesn’t feel like the multitude of clone characters you’d find in “Super Smash Bros.,” many of them feel like they’re stealing elements from the game’s clear inspiration.
Characters like Powdered Toast Man from “The Ren & Stimpy Show” feature a down-special move exactly like Fox McCloud’s shine from Melee, and a character like Leonardo from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” feels like a lethargic version of the “Fire Emblem” character Marth.
While playing on the Nintendo Switch version, the game also suffered from frequent frame drops during the arcade mode and often had each character’s head glitching into platforms when the fight started.
Regardless of the relatively small development experience that studio Ludosity has, the game is a major let down when you think about how big the franchises attached to the game are.
“Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl” had potential, yet was squandered due to the game’s rushed and underdeveloped execution. It goes for a hefty price of $49.99 when, in reality, paying anything over $19.99 should be a crime.