Brawl Busters Review

Brawl Busters is a F2P MMO that slipped by with a release in the middle of December. Now I’ll be the first to always express my disdain when a new MMO (especially a F2P one) comes out, but I promise you this one is actually worth your time.

Brawl Busters
Developer: SkeinGlobe
Price: Free-to-Play
Platform: PC (reviewed)

Unlike most MMO titles, this one shares a *slight* similarity with TF2. They both focus on class based combat, they aren’t shy about showing that it’s a humorous game, and they both have a pretty similar art style. That’s pretty much where the similarities end since Brawl Busters plays like a fantastic beat ’em up with a bigger focus on environment navigation too.

So there are five classes to play in Brawl Busters: the Blitzer, the Slugger, the Firefighter, the Rocker, and the Boxer. The Blitzer is the tank football player who uses a football to perform devastating area-of-effect attacks. What the Blitzer has in being slow is made up for in having one of the highest HP of all the classes and damage. The Slugger is a baseball player who’s mostly a ranged fighter. You could get in close and swing your bat around, but don’t expect to do as much damage as you could if you stayed in the back knocking balls at people instead. The Firefighter is more a defensive unit and works similar to the Blitzer in terms of stats. The Firefighter has a powerful hose attack that blasts back enemies (great with crowd control) and can pull out a shield to defend areas. The Rocker is definitely a fun class to play and is the most balanced of the classes with even stats. You can swing your guitar around, blast enemies with electrical currents of rock ‘n roll, or perform a powerful AOE attack. Finally, the Boxer is one of the riskiest classes to play as with their low health. They can a short reach of attack, but they pull of some nasty hooks and wind-up a powerful knock-out punch that sends enemies flying. After trying them all out I can easily say that the Boxer is my favorite class. I like the risk of being one of the classes with the lowest health and limited range, but once you get in close you can deal some major damage when you begin to pummel your opponents.

You’ll only be able to play as one class when you start the game but you’ll quickly earn an unlock for another class once you hit level 2 or 3. I assume that you earn more unlocks as you continue to level up. There are around a dozen tutorial missions that each focus on showing you the various things you’ll need to learn to succeed in multiplayer matches such as evading, how to get power-ups, pulling off special attacks, and how to traverse the environment like punching fire hydrants to jump up buildings. There are also five final missions that allow you to play as each of the five classes with their own objective focused on their style of play. It would’ve really been nice for those missions to be available right from the start instead of having to guess which class you wanted, but I suppose you could hold onto your unlock point until after you finish those final missions if you picked something you didn’t like.

Now let’s get down to the reason you’ll be playing this game, the combat. Your primary attack is done with the left mouse button, your secondary is done with the right, and your special attack is performed by pressing both together. You can also hold down each button for a longer attack. Sprinting is done by holding Shift which can also give you another attack when performed while sprinting and space bar jumps. The controls are quite easy to figure out and you’ll soon get into the flow of the game after a few matches. Jumping is used for getting around the stages with trucks to climb on top of, buildings to get onto, trampolines/bounce pads, fire hydrants that toss you into the air, floor panels that increase your speed, and that’s not including the environment hazards such as lava, giant balls & trains. I especially love how quick it is to change your class during a match (when you die an image for each class shows up and you select the one you want to respawn as) which keeps things nice and fast.

Brawl Busters includes five modes: Team Deathmatch, Free-for-All, Zombie mode, Boss Battle, & Glow mode. TDM and FFA throw up to 8 players together with the winner being the person/team with the most kills by the end of the round. A new rule of this gen is that each game worth its merit must have a horde mode or zombies, and Brawl Busters gives you both. You’ll go through 5 waves of increasingly difficult zombies with 3 other players (4 total). Each wave tosses in a a new zombie type to freshen things up such as a hulking slower moving doofus, a Gollum looking zombie who’s a slippery bastard, and a baseball player who keep their distance while tossing balls at you. The boss battle is another co-op mode with 4 players where a giant pink ‘thing’ will battle you while summoning zombie minions. I wouldn’t really recommend fighting him solo so get yourself a good team in this mode. The final mode is Glow where defeated players drop ‘glow’ and your goal is to simply collect it. Team with the most glow by the end wins. A nice thing I like is that matches are surprisingly fast. Instead of slugging through a round it’ll usually be over in around 5 minutes which helps keep the pace up a bit.

As with most MMO’s there’s a store to spend you hard earned money in. Brawl Busters seems to fall into the category of “Pay to Win” MMO titles since the costumes/weapons that cost real money to acquire are the only ones that actually boost your stats. Items are purchased with BP or RP, BP is earned through regular games and RP is bought with real money. The shop has a collection of goofy items to deck your character out in such as giant afros, shades straight from Gurren Lagann, pants, shoes, various accessories, and different weapons depending on your class. The clothing also depends on your class with the Boxer having more boxing related clothing options and the Rocker having more punk clothes. This is just for the clothing and weapons though, accessories are able to be worn by any class. Weapons also have different secondary/special moves attached to them, so it’s worth checking out what moves will be available to you before you pick one. You can even buy upgrades for your character.

The Final Word
Brawl Busters surprised me with a fun beat ’em up MMO that I can just jump into for a quick match with easy ‘pick up and play’ gameplay. The classes all feel different enough to make it worth your time to try them all out and the art style has a nice quirky look to it. With more content planned you can be sure I’ll be keeping my eye on this game. My main gripe with the game is that the community (besides being quite small) can be insufferable cunts at times. I’d either enter a room and the host refuse to start the game because they wanted to be a total jackass or hosts would straight up kick you for playing a class they don’t like without giving you the chance of switching classes. Being put on Steam would also be quite nice for better friend support *hint hint SkeinGlobe*

– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair