Brawlout Preview

After spending hundreds of hours on Super Smash Bros. but orphaned of Wii U for buying a Nintendo Switch in its place, I was missing playing a nice ignorant fighting game that would throw me into the fray. What better opportunity, therefore, to try Brawlout, platform fighting game that takes its cue from the Nintendo title, currently in early access on Steam and already available for purchase at a price of dollars 19,99.

There really isn't much to do in this trial version - there are only modes you can try out Quick Play and l 'online courses, the latter unusable at the time of my game session given the probable very low number of users all over the world (I spent a few tens of minutes looking for an opponent with poor results). So I immediately jumped into the fray and the first impact was not the most positive: a roster made up of six characters, with only three other slots free and therefore presumably the total number of fighters will reach 9, a little bit. The characters currently available, however, are well characterized and differentiated from each other, each with their own abilities and statistics: we therefore have the eagle that makes jumping and flying its greatest peculiarity, the monkey that moves at a speed higher than the others. , a frog-wrestler who combines attacks to carry out a large number of combos, a sort of walrus with the power of ice, a hedgehog with that of electricity and a balanced fighter, perfect to start. Once you have chosen the character, you immediately find yourself in the game arena, ready to fight; a positive thing you will think, more or less: excellent the fact that there are no uploads and that everything is really almost immediate, but a countdown before the start of the match would have been welcome. Once in the fray, it immediately becomes clear that the rules of Brawlout are practically the same as those of Super Smash Bros., to increase the percentage of damage of one's own or one's opponents so as to be able to send them more and more easily off the stage.

But unfortunately the whole thing is very confusing, fast and frenetic, too much: in the first few games you will have a hard time understanding what is happening, especially in four-handed scrums; furthermore, the woody and "snappy" animations do not help in identifying the enemies' hitbox with precision: you will then hit them in bursts trying to get as close as possible, without thinking too much about it. The situation certainly improves after a fair number of games and after having studied the moveset of all five characters well and become familiar with the type of gameplay, it will be all too easy to win games even with the CPU level at maximum.
At this stage of development Brawlout, in addition to quick games, unfortunately does not have much else to offer: the menus are easy to consult and in the options you can play with the various settings to optimize the graphics sector on your PC; very nice the possibility, in the extras, of read some sort of biography of each character, which makes them more interesting rather than simple matadors to be exploited in battles.

The technical sector is average: the graphic style adopted is perfect for the type of game, colorful and bright, but if on the one hand we have well characterized and quite detailed fighters, on the other we have bare and flat arenas (not that in the hustle and bustle of combat you have time to observe the background, mind you). The sound sector is mediocre: in the menu we have only one theme, engaging but repetitive in the long run, while inside the stages you will find it hard to hear if some background music is actually playing. In the norm the sound effects, with verses of the characters and the fist fights that do their duty.

Overall Brawlout is a sufficient title, very justified by its being in beta and therefore with many room for improvement. If the roster is expanded adequately, the online will work properly and the title will be enriched with some modalities, in addition to an improved graphic (already good) and sound (above all) sector, we could find ourselves faced with a valid alternative " low cost "to the best known Super Smash Bros.