Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl(NASB) is one of the most fun games I have played this year. However, the lack of content has made writing a review for this game tricky. This post was made as a companion piece to the review I will be writing, as well as other articles I have planned.
Below I listed five features that I think should have been added to the game. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a great game made by a talented team. However, with a full retail game, the expectations are a little higher. Despite my complaints below the core gameplay is great.
Missing Voicelines
All of the characters in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl are iconic. However, a huge part of these characters is their voices. When someone sees Patrick, Aang, or Zim their voices come to mind. Despite this, NASB does not include any voice lines in the game. This makes the game seem incredibly empty during a match, as all you hear are the attack noises and background music.
Having voices would make the characters feel similar to how they are in their shows. For how much love was put into the references in this game I have a feeling that voice acting is something they wanted. A lot of things go into a game like this, but this extra set of polish would be appreciated!
Crossplay
The game is playable on five platforms which is pretty good. However, the online community is fractured between these five platforms. I played this game on PS4, so I can only play the game against other people on the PS4. While this is fine for launch it will start to be a problem soon. Each platform will slowly start to dwindle in terms of the player base. This will make it so each game only has a couple of active players at a time.
This would be fixed by having all players regardless of platforms duke it out. This is something the developers have talked about, but it is absent for the time being.
Costumes or Alternate Colors
This is a huge oversight in the game’s design. In a mirror match, the players both look the same. This makes that experience very challenging. Smash handles this by having two be different colors, or have different costumes. I suspect this is a problem with branding, as they are iconic characters. Nickelodeon might have a problem with a red SpongeBob or a pink Catdog.
The other solution is alternate costumes that are in line with the character’s show. This would give the game more life, but it is another model that needs to be made. NASB feels like a budget title, and this is an instance of that.
A More Robust Training Mode
This is something that is only relevant to fighting game fans, but the training mode in this game is almost useless. Seeing the hitboxes makes the game a little easier to learn at a high level. The problem is that you are just fighting against a normal computer or a friend with hitboxes shown. A normal training mode would let you set inputs for your opponent, and practice how to counter that.
This is something that should be in the game, and for how many competitive friendly features they added it seems like this would have made it in. However, I don’t see this ever getting added. Balancing is their top priority, so this is just a low priority.
Better Offline Content
The arcade in this mode is not great. The dialogue is really bad, and the game doesn’t have a boss battle that makes the arcade mode any more different than playing a series of matches with random CPUs. The other offline sidemode is the Sports game which is not fun. Most of the maps are just not made for this, and it shows.
I think the game would be better if it had a good variety of side game modes to play. This could be a story mode or an updated arcade mode. I don’t have many ideas, but sometimes I want to try something new.