I have no idea what happened with this universe that I’m actually reviewing this game. I’d usually  just straight up ignore this licensed rip-off kinda deal. But this game, it got my attention.

And I wasn’t the only one, as it got the attention of the competitive Smash fanbase in a pretty big way, and the Smash fanbase overall. The moment it got peoples’ attention is when the dev was revealed to be Ludosity, who previously made Slap City, a Smash clone that I hear is pretty okay, but also with the gameplay demos (including in-depth moveset showcases for all the characters) we were shown a game that looked way better than you may expect from something like this. As in, it actually looked good.

So yeah… let’s talk about this one! I don’t think it will be a super long review, but we’ll see.

*EDIT: As I was writing this review a patch came out for the game and I didn’t notice, it does fix some things I mention, mostly as far as character balance*

Developer: Ludosity
Publisher: GameMill Entertainment
Release date: October 5th 2021
Platforms: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox Series X/S (played on Switch, though PC is apparently the more popular platform for it, at least with online)
Genre: Platform Fighter

So this is a Smash-style platform fighter. While Smash is the undisputed king of the genre, there’s still a few other good ones, such as Rivals of Aether (which is super good), like I said before I hear Slap City is good and the sadly-stuck-on-the-DS Jump Super Stars series is a very different take but also very fun. There’s a lot of very meh ones too though. Just to be clear, the Playstation one is the worst, by far, due to having fundamentally broken gameplay design.

So Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl… Lets talk about all the meh before we jump into what makes this game good. Because there is a good amount of meh. First off, there’s no content. If you’re not playing online, you’re just fighting CPUs, of levels from 0 to 9. There’s an arcade mode, which is just a couple fights with CPUs of a level based on the difficulty you chose… And that’s it. The choices for CPU/local battles are Stock, Timed and Sport. Sport is a shitty version where there’s a soccer ball to kick through a goal. Not super fun. If you’re looking for a good single-player game, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Other issues are with the presentation. The characters… well, I think Nickelodeon told the devs “Make Spongebob look very good” and not AS much care was put into the rest. Let’s be clear, most of the characters actually look pretty good, but some of the animation isn’t quite as smooth for some of them. Except Danny Phantom, he looks pretty bad. Another issue of course is that there’s no voice acting, other than the announcer. Not even vague “HAYAAA” noises on attacks, no grunts when getting hit and such. It can work in a pixel game like Rivals of Aether, but in a game with iconic Nickelodeon cartoon characters with distinct voices… not as much. It’s a pretty glaring missing feature (which might be added later on, but… for now, no). Despite all that, the devs did manage to give the characters a lot of personality through their movesets and idle animations and taunts, so at least there’s that. One thing that currently sucks is that there’s no alternate colors/costumes, so if 2 players choose Nigel Thornberry, they’ll look absolutely identical other than the P1 and P2 icons over them… not ideal. The levels are okay, their backgrounds tend to be pretty good. Some of them are obvious “This is the Smashville of this game” and “This is clearly just Battlefield”. You know how the meme goes: “No items, Powdered Toast Man Only, Harmonic Convergence”. The “non-serious” levels are meh, especially the Sandy stage which is just crap, but the serious stages are fine (and an upcoming free character update has a good one too). One thing though is that all the levels have shitty music. The Zim level is fine, that’s about it honestly. So presentation… is okay but needs a lot of work. Work that I hope happens sooner rather than later.

So I’ve been kinda shitting on this game so far, and rightfully so, it does have issues ass far as content and presentation and, for now, I need to point that out. There’s a chance some of that will be changed in later patches, we’ll see. But I gotta review the game as it is now (which is near-launch after one or 2 hotfix patches but nothing major). I’ll be legit mad if I post this and Garfield just comes out randomly alongside a bunch of cool fixes. But this game does have it where it counts, that being gameplay.

So what separates this from just being a regular Smash clone? Actually a lot. Firstly, it’s way faster than any Smash, around Melee level but I’d say a bit faster. It’s very combo focused. Essentially, while an opponent is in the air from a hit, you can hit them. Attacks can knock enemies back in pretty obvious directions, though some attacks have REALLY weird knockback. Like, the Korra air down light attack makes the character fall super slowly down, so you can land from the attack and combo off of them in that time. Very strange, but it works out nicely for combos. People have been figuring out some pretty wild combos. Then projectiles are really different from Smash, as literally every character can reflect any projectile using a strong attack, or grab them with the grab button to throw them back. And speaking of grabs, everyone has the DK grab from Smash so they hold people above their heads and they can walk with them… but not just that, you can grab in the air. If you grab someone off-stage far enough and throw them at the blast-zone, that’s that. It’s hard to do, but fun. There’s many other changes. No air dodges here, but instead you have an air-dash, which you can cancel out of with any attack, or use diagonally down to wave-dash (which is a good movement option). There’s a few wacky things you can do with air-dashing.

So how this game works at its core is that you have 4 main buttons. Jump, which does have double jumps. You can only jump with a button, so if you’re used to tap-jumping in Smash you’ll have to get used to something different.. Light attack, which are usually faster, combo-focused attacks. Then Strong attack, which aren’t quite smashes but they’re attacks with usually lots of knockback. And finally Specials, which are very different for each character, though the Up special is usually a recovery move. All attack buttons have 3 variation: Up, Down and Neutral. There’s no side attacks in this game like Smash does, which is fine. As I mentioned before you have the air-dash on all characters, which isn’t an evasive action, but it has some cool uses. For example, this game doesn’t have Smash-style fast-fall, but you can air-dash down to simulate that effect. You can also run (just move in one direction long enough), and both the Light and Strong buttons have a dash attack. If you hit with a dash attack, you can immediately cancel that hit into any attack. There’s some pretty strong things you can do with this. The air-dash button is the guard button on the ground, though if you’re not careful and guard on the ledge, you get stunned. You can parry too, honestly not too sure of the effect of it. And finally you can strafe, so basically lock your direction and move in any direction (while you’ll attack in the same direction), which can be useful for certain combos.

So yeah, you attack your opponent, do combos, and try to hit with a strong when percentage is high enough to send the opponent into the blast zone. If you’re knocked out you can try to come back with double jumps and your recovery moves, and grab the ledge. You can grab the edge to prevent a character from grabbing it (ala old smash), and invincibility from ledges is weird so you have to be careful (if you grab it after an attack you get a bit of invincibility, if not you can get hit off right away). It does have all these different options that Smash doesn’t, so it feels pretty different. Each character has some pretty cool unique things about them. Patrick has a lot of grabs. Ren & Stimpy have wacky moves with kinda crazy hitboxes. Powdered Toast Man is the joke character that actually has cool options. Lucy Loud has the literal best move in the game with her vampire mode Jump Scare teleport move. Reptar is just crazy with several really powerful attacks. Powdered Toast Man can waveshine (like Melee Fox). Oblina has a wacky-ass projectile (and also she’s fast and she just wins). Nigel is wacky and has some really unique moves (including Smashing which is basically Jigglypuff’s Rest). Zim has a weird trap-related strategy… and so on, not gonna name them all. You’re sure to find a character you like, from the actually really strong all-rounder Spongebob to the transforming CatDog.

The character balance is also actually not bad. Basically only Patrick is, like, obviously worse than everyone else, and even if, say, Oblina, CatDog and Lucy are obviously the best characters right now (not counting the current Michelangelo light-nair infinite), it still pretty much feels like the other characters can compete at a high level. Basically every character has something completely broken, so they all tend to have pretty good options, both for combos and just… general play.

I will talk about online quickly. I haven’t played it (because I refuse to pay for online on a console), but I’ve seen it a lot. It does seem pretty good, which it should be because it uses rollback netcode (though if your internet is bad/having issues, it does mess up quite a bit). I will note rollback inclusion isn’t fully available, but for the usual use for most people, it’s fine. Basically, 1 v 1 fights will have rollback on all platforms, but more than 1 v 1 won’t on Switch, PS4 and Xbone. One thing that needs to be fixed is the lobbies. They’re very unstable (sometimes you just can’t load a match in a lobby, for kinda no reason), and private lobbies which you can password lock just don’t work most of the time.

Overall

This does feel a bit like a game that’s not finished development, and the way devs have talked about it, that seems to be the case (more like they were rushed to get it out too quickly). But they are very involved in the community, so glitches and really bad infinites seem to get handled pretty quick. And they have hinted that there’s more coming. We already know there’s 2 new characters coming (one of them was datamined and found to be Garfield, which is awesome) in free updates, possibly paid DLC characters, and overall new content that the devs have not really talked about that may be more than just characters and stages. We know, based on datamined info, that alt costumes seem to be planned (and would be great because not having them is a bit… oof), and that some non-character-related levels were also worked on at some point, such as a Double Dare level… so there’s some good potential as the game keeps going. A bit of a shame it had to happen like this instead of coming out complete, but hey, sometimes you gotta take what you can get.

So what I’m saying is… Give this game a chance. It looks cheap, it might not be complete yet, but it’s actually good. The gameplay is a take on Smash, but it’s not quite Smash. It handles things a bit differently, there’s some weird OTG options for combos, it’s super fast, some attacks have pretty unique knockback effects, projectiles are a weird, not-yet-fully-explored option since everyone can reflect any projectile. It actually feels a bit more like Rivals of Aether, but even that plays completely differently. It’s a nice addition to the platform fighter genre.

I’ve seen people complaining that 20 characters is too little (and it’s gonna be 22 with the free updates)… but it’s a new fighting game “series”, a “low” roster isn’t really out of the ordinary for the first game in a franchise. Heck, even sequels to old series are pretty shitty on that end nowadays, with Street Fighter V launching with 16 characters. Street Fighter has no excuse since it’s a long-running series with a shitload of characters… other than “we wanted to sell an incomplete game and make people pay for DLC for the rest of it”. Or Guilty Gear Strive came out with just 15 characters (same idea as SF5 with the DLC)… so this Nickelodeon Brawl is actually doing something better than long-running series as far as roster count. Smash is pretty much the only long-running series to have done it right with Ultimate. And you can’t compare any fighting game to Smash Ultimate, it’s pretty much just unfair in every aspect.

I would give a pretty good recommendation for this game, but maybe you’d prefer to wait for more content and that’s fine. It’s definitely better than it has any right to be, I was really surprised seeing gameplay early, and I’m still surprised playing it.

Where the fuck is Timmy though? Ludosity, listen, I’ll give you money to play as Timmy, alright?