Brawlout similar to Smash but so disappointing
BRAWLOUT Nintendo Switch 4/10
EVEN without intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a video game studio, it doesn’t seem too presumptuous to question the credentials of any outfit that would roll out a game so ill-conceived and unfinished as Brawlout.
A little more than loosely-based on the wildly popular Super Smash Bros series of games, Brawlout seems to be filling a rather large unoccupied space in the Nintendo Switch market.
From the outset, it is very clear that Brawlout eschews most of the wackiness from the content-rich Smash series, opting to instead focus on the pure fighting favoured by hardcore competitive Smash fans.
Bar the puzzling omission of shielding or grabbing moves, the controls in Brawlout are almost identical to those of Smash, as is virtually every other aspect of the actual gameplay.
What can be said for Brawlout is that the cast is presented well and extremely well balanced. When Brawlout really begins to grate is with its progression system.
While it is acknowledged that bashing loot boxes is the current hot take in gaming now, Brawlouts glacial and arbitrary progression grind is almost unbearable.
At the beginning of the game you are given just three stages to play with. To unlock more, you have to level up a particular character across many fights meaning that you can’t just stick with a character you like, instead you must play each character a painful amount of times to unlock things that should really already be accessible.
Compounding this frustration even further is the absolute farce that is the online play.
If you are lucky, a very small selection of the matches you play will be smooth enough to allow for the intricate controller inputs required of such high-tempo games.
Unfortunately, most of the matches you will play will almost certainly be laggy to the point where the matches become more of a slideshow than a video game.
To say Brawlout is disappointing would be an understatement. You would be far better off waiting for the inevitable release of a true Super Smash Bros title on the Nintendo Switch.