Speed Brawl (2018)

Intro

In Speed Brawl you play "races". The first race consists of three maps, each with three fights. At the end of the race you get a medal based on how fast you killed everything. Aside from typical brawling you can also use walls and poles for special attacks.

Playtime: 30 minutes

The Good

• The cartoon art looks good.
• Wall kicks, pole attacks and tag attacks are neat.
• Node-map, skills and stores add choice.

The Bad

• Randomised loot. Just... why?
• Pointless story stuff i started skipping after a few minutes.
• If you are slow in one map you can't just replay that one.
• Clunky tutorial where the instructor takes up half the screen when talking.

The Ugly

• I really hate time limits. Any other level design or scoring system would've been preferable.
• Really bad menus. Equipping and selling takes way too many clicks. You can't even drag and drop or Shift-click or whatever.
• The godawful "press Enter to start" screen that infests games for some fucking reason doesn't respond to mouse clicks, but the ads playing before that do. Seriously, how hard is it to use consistent menu controls?
• Instead of having a starting team and being able to change them at the start of the match you have to select two characters every single time. You also have to select a save slot every time you boot. And quitting takes too many screens as well. It's really weird to get such simple things wrong.

Conclusion

Speed Brawl is a decent brawler dragged down by a bad interface and time limits. And honestly, the core gameplay isn't that good either. The only three basic attacks are punch, special (w/stamina bar) and charge/ram. It's a bit too simple if that's your only gameplay.