I also have to address the giant mutant half-man-half-elephant in the room - only including two of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feels like it should be illegal somehow.
I do consider Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s roster to be a good (if nostalgic) one, but a lot of the characters’ movesets seem ill-conceived or half-baked, lacking in the sort of flow I would prefer to see from a fighting game character. Honestly they even sort of fill me with existential dread, because it makes it feel a little bit like the characters have been plucked from their own realities and don’t even see what I’m seeing. Ultimately, the ‘interactions’ make no sense and the game would be better off without them. The text doesn’t actually reference the other character or provide any sort of meaningful context at all -surely another flaw in this crossover fighting game- so it’s just kind of an annoying time waster. These quotes are odd, because they’re just lines from the show, despite the fact no voice lines are playing alongside them. At one point I fought April O’Neil and she said “This is April O’Neil on the top floor” with no punctuation …despite the fact she was standing on top of a pirate ship at the time. This weirdness is only compounded with an odd choice where characters will say things out of context. Even if they couldn’t get expensive voice acting names like Tom Kenny or Tim Curry, I’d have taken soundalikes over silence.Ī silent fighting game is weird and that’s one of the biggest things that makes the game feel like a cheap cash grab. One of the biggest let downs is that there’s voice acting at all. Sadly, what largely lets Nick All-Star Brawl down is that it often just seems unfinished, with things you’d expect to be there either missing or feeling half-baked. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s lack of polish I’m not sure who decided that putting sinking platforms and an auto-scrolling camera into one level was a good idea, but they were wrong. I will say that the game’s battle stage designs are mostly good, with the exception of a Ren & Stimpy one that is frankly, terrible. It’s better realised than something like 2017’s BrawlOut, but it still often feels lacking and stiff. A lot of them either don’t have the reach you’d want them to, or just sort of snap to the edge of the stages and feel unsatisfying.Īll Star Brawl’s heavy ‘kill confirm’ attacks feel like they are lacking in collision impact, and the only one who feels like there is any “Smash” to his right stick finishers is Catdog. A lot of character’s recovery skills just seem to be … bad. Melee because that’s the way the fighting game community likes them. There’s also a strange lack of grab hits, air dodges and dodge rolls, but Ludosity have still added wavedashing and dashdancing mechanics that feel basically lifted from Super Smash Bros. NASB saves your preferences, but it was a setting that you’d have to make each time in multiplayer mode for Player 2, 3, and 4. Strangely, there’s no way to set these inputs on an options menu, so you have to do it on the character select. Thankfully I could remap things, as Attack should be A, Specials should be B … and I could ignore that heavy attack was mapped to a button at all and just use the right stick. It felt a bit like if you went on a shooter, and shoot was on the left trigger while looking down sights was on the right one. 20 years of Smash design conventions were thrown out of the window, and everything upon an initial boot up felt like it was on the wrong button. It’s weird to do a fighter-clone and then distinctly not clone the controls. One of the first things I noticed about Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is that the controls are “wrong” for a Smash style game.
has done, I don’t think that I’m being cruel when I say that Nintendo’s take on the genre should serve as the bar to hit for the fundamentals. While I don’t think that party fighters should all be beholden to exclusively what Super Smash Bros.