Speed Brawl Review: Raging Through the Streets

If you follow my reviews on this site, you’ll know I love brawlers. No matter the style, system, or subject matter, I eat them up like a fat guy at an all you can eat buffet. Ever since my childhood, they’ve held a sweet spot in my heart and being a father, it’s a love I’ve shared with my kid. The newest contender in the genre, Speed Brawl, adds some fun new mechanics with mixed results.

While it is common for similar games to have a timer, it’s typically much more forgiving and results in losing a life or a point bonus at the end of the level. This venture takes the timer to a whole new playing field, as you’ll only have a small window of time to make it through short segments of the course, taking out the enemy forces as quickly and smoothly as possible. The trick to success is to build up your combo and momentum with the various tools at your disposal to fill in the gaps between attacks with things like poles, the tagging feature, and bouncing off of walls for devastating attacks, allowing your characters to deal bonus damage. If used properly, larger enemies will fall within seconds, whereas failure will result in some of the most tedious gameplay I’ve experienced in the genre.

Initially, the game is fairly accessible, using somewhat dense enemies that often stand there simply waiting to be punched in the face, or lack thereof since a great deal of the enemies look like caricatures of the bugs from Starship Troopers. Once the enemies start putting up a fight, you’ll quickly learn your fighters are not nearly as hardy as you’d expect, with minor attacks taking huge chunks of health from you as well as breaking your momentum/combo, requiring you to tag in and out between the two fighters you select from the start of the course. Much like tag team fighting games, this tool is used to extend combos, as well as being the sole way to recoup health, even between multi-level events. If one of your characters happen to fall, you’re given a short period of time to revive them, adding a bit of a risk vs reward element to the gameplay – do you waste precious time to truck your way over to them, losing even more momentum, or push forward with only a single character? In most cases, either way will leave you a bit screwed.

Around the second chapter of the game, the enemies become much more challenging, with attacks that reverse your controls for a short period of time (which is infuriating), stun you for an ungodly period of time while the clock keeps on ticking (even more infuriating), among other elemental attacks. Not only do the enemies decide to actually show up for the game around this point, environmental hazards come into play, which are extremely hard to avoid due to the quick pace and often exaggerated movements that the characters make pre and post attack. Making matters worse, some enemy types require you to hit their sweet spot to stun them, the worst offender being a specific enemy that resembles a giant crab with a pink oversized zit on its back, which likes to hang out under some jagged rocks (that your downward aerial attack sends you right into the path of) or static platforms that you get hung up on mid attack, effectively breaking your combo and more often than not, having to restart the entire run. This level was by far the worst experience in a beat ‘em up I’ve ever encountered, requiring way too much of my time to surpass, especially when it was early into the game.

The combat is fast paced and fluid, with responsive controls that are easy to pick up, but hard to master. The brawling feels on par with Shank or a 2D version of DMC. Even if you’re less versed in the art of the air juggle, you can typically button mash your way to success, and if you’re older like me, you’ll likely be walking away with sore hands after each and every session. The ever growing cast of combatants helps fight off repetition, even though the majority of the cast controls and plays almost exactly the same. Sure, there are some larger characters that deal more damage, but their lack of speed hardly makes up for the buff. Completing successful runs will earn you randomly dropped items, which can also be purchased in the game’s mid mission store, which add additional abilities or buffs to your characters. In addition to the items, there is a leveling system in place, albeit a bit flawed. Instead of a traditional XP system, you’ll level your characters by earning the different tiered medals on each challenge, which makes getting over slumps in the difficulty much harder than if they went with the standard leveling system. Each character levels separately, depending on how often you use them, which deterred me from experimenting much outside of the early characters I unlocked.

The challenges you’ll face are broken down into various types of events, with the most common being a championship event, which pits you on a course of three back to back courses, often culminating with a boss battle. As I mentioned previously, the lack of refilling your health bar can make these more tedious; if you fail due to running out of time or by dying, you have to start the whole thing over. The other events will task you with racing through an enemy free level, hitting the position poles to build up speed, maintaining a combo, or simply killing huge waves of enemies.

By far the biggest issue with Speed Brawl is the frequency of the loading screens, which take almost as long as a successful run. Upon completing an event, you’ll load into a story board segment that drives the narrative forward, only to load again into the main menu, each and every time. Just when you think you’re done with these, you to have to load into the next event. Making matters worse, the fire animation in the corner of the loading screen has a penchant for freezing for long periods of time, making me feel like the game froze. Outside of this, the presentation is on point, with hand drawn Manga meets Euro Steampunk visuals and fast paced music to get you into the groove. Much like the previously mentioned comparison to Shank, the hand drawn enemies and backgrounds are works of beauty, with fully animated backgrounds that show the post-apocalyptic chaos in the background. While these are repeated quite often, the rogues gallery is gigantic, with new enemies being added regularly to keep the player on their toes. There is a fairly deep narrative in place that plays out via stop motion comic styled cut scenes, filled with British slang that caused me to lose interest pretty early in. All you need to know to get into the game is that the story follows a post alien invasion in the 1800s.

It wouldn’t be a proper brawler without co-op play being offered, which can be done via online or couch co-op. This adds an additional layer of challenge as your partner will quickly have to pick up on the nuances of the game or face the dreaded count down. This proved to be a bit too challenging for my son, resulting in the bulk of my time being played solo. The only issue I had with this mode is that in the event you only have a few of the characters unlocked, both players may end up with the same character (with minor palette swaps) on the screen, resulting in utter chaos due to the fast pace and often overwhelming number of enemies on the screen at any given time.

As an overall package despite its shortcomings, Speed Brawl is a decent brawler that tries to implement some unique mechanics, even if they don’t work on every facet. If you’re bored of the standard titles in the genre, this will pose a worthy challenge – just don’t fall behind.

7 out of 10

Pros

  • Beautiful Hand Drawn Visuals
  • Huge Rogues Gallery
  • Accessible Yet Deep Combat

Cons

  • Shallow Story
  • Loading Occurs Too Frequently
  • Overly Harsh Timer
  • Some Unpolished Mechanics

Speed Brawl was developed by Double Stallion Games and published Kongregate. It was released on NS, PC, PS4, and X1 September 18th, 2018 for $19.99. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Speed Brawl, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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