Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (2021)

it lacks single-player content and the online is not sure active, but the moves are all cool references, it has a ton of stages, characters, items, and now that it has voices the game has a lot more life in it, it's a cool game to change up the pace or play with friends, it's a shame it's lacking features from its lunch killed its momentum, but it's still a solid pick to get on a sale

So as an enormous fan of Smash Bros. in all its iterations I make it a habit to try every platform fighter that comes out to see how they stack up. So how do the cartoon Nick stars of our childhood stack up against every video game character ever? Well as far as gameplay feel this is the most satisfying non-Smash platform fighter outside of Rivals of Aether. Combos are fun, and pretty build a bear as you go, which is good for a platform fighter. The characters do have their own unique feel, though for some its very hard to get an idea of what the gameplan for them should be and balance is all over the place right now. With 4 people this is a great time to just mash some fun out and occasionally see Catdog combo Korra to death. But with the positives out of the way, pretty much all the package around the fighting is ROUGH. I don't want to come down too hard as I feel like it was more a budget issue than a lack of talent, but the animations are inconsistent from character to character, with some being passable and others being downright broken. The music is hilariously awful with only a few tracks being remotely appropriate for a fighting game, which is not helped at all by the total lack of voice acting, and below average sound design. And Sweet Christ the load times. Playing on Switch it takes over half a minute for the match to load regardless of the number of players, which is doubly frustrating in Arcade mode, where if you kill your opponent fast enough you will spend more time in load screens than fighting. There's other areas of the UI, menu layout, and general modes and stuff that could also use some polish. But again, I don't want to be mean as at the core of all that mess is a very well done core fighting engine with a solid roster of well loved characters, even if they don't look sound or really play as much like themselves as I'd like in some cases. I'm hoping the game does well, and that the developers get the opportunity to improve the games other aspects post launch, but as it is right now this is definitely not the "Smash killer" the clickbait Youtube thumbnails make it out to be. That being said Smash get some fucking rollback you cowards.