Hey everyone, it’s SurpriseEnema with a new game review!
*cries of excitement and panties drop in droves*
What is Brawl, you ask? Well… I’ll tell you. This is a new horror-themed party game developed by The Bloober Team, and released on the 28th of April, 2015. Now, the interesting thing about this game is merely the fact that it is very much a party game at its core. There are not many of these existing on the Playstation 4 platform, so it was nice to see it exist. I personally love sitting on the couch with friends and playing a great game, and Brawl is sure to be a new standard in my group of friends.

Time to piss off your friends

The rules of Brawl are fairly simple at best: You play as one of eight characters with up to three other players and essentially are placed in a maze with various crates which contain goodies such as bombs and fire extending blasts etc.
Each player moves across the board finding goodies to collect to make themselves capable of planting bombs in whatever locations they deem fit. You are supposed to earn the most points, and doing this means blowing up your fellow players. You have to be careful however, because if you trap yourself in the blast range, you can blow yourself up.
The entire objective of the game is to kill everything in your way and become the victor. This is the objective in both the story-mode as well as in the party-play mode.
Sound familiar? That’s because the formula is the tried-and-true one used by the Hudson Soft franchise Bomberman. Wait, you don’t know what Bomberman is? How dare you! Educate yourself, before I throw up in your general direction!
Now, like I said, there are plenty of crazy characters to choose from. With each character, there is plenty of variation of special skills that each possess. One character for instance, has a Medusa-styled gaze that freezes their target for a short-time. However, if strategy isn’t your thing, you can just kick the shit out of the bombs closer to your opponents.
There are plenty of quirky traps that exist on the playing field, and they can either aide you or mess with you.

It’s pretty much Bomberman with clowns 🙁

Now, the game isn’t just a party game. There is a story-mode where you go through playing as various characters and learning the back story of the characters. I don’t want to give much of the story away, because I found it immensely interesting. I will say that each character is unique in its own way, and the story-mode allows the player to become familiar with them and learn their playing style. This allows the player to choose a favorite and kick ass against their friends!
You start the story-mode playing as a “sad clown” and honestly, as someone who absolutely hates the very idea of clowns, it took all of my strength and some liquid courage to get through that crap. However, the payoff was worth it as I was playing a much updated, and innovated version of Bomberman.
There is also an online mode that allows the players to play with other people all over the world. So, if you are a lonely loser who doesn’t have friends? That’s fine! There are two online modes that can be explored:
• Versus: It’s a basic maze-like arena where you compete with other people and you kick the shit out of them! Pretty self-explanatory honestly.
• Duel: This is a player v. player mode where the player is in a much smaller arena with another person. It’s not so much arena-style as it is fighting. You’re head to head with someone else, and you have to kill them.
You can play with complete strangers! But the game isn’t designed with online play in mind. The Bloober Team realized that even though online multiplayer has become the norm in the industry, they wanted the classic couch multiplayer to still exist. This is definitely achieved with Brawl.

Colour Domination MuthaFuckas!

There are many versions of the couch multiplayer that the players can explore, such as the Colour Domination variant. The basic premise of this is to change the tiles underneath you and make them your respected colour. You have to keep this up until the timer runs out, and whomever has the most coloured tiles wins! Pretty simple? Heck no, especially when you have someone who knows what they are doing! (I’m looking at you Plasma Captain)
So, what is Brawl you continue to ask yourself? Well, did you bother to read this review? Seriously? In summation, it’s a horror-themed party game where you play as various messed up carnival characters in Bomberman-styled areas where you have to blow up shit to become the winner.
The graphics are gritty and dark, but it works for the theme of the game aesthetically, but honestly… it’s Bomberman for a generation that either will A) appreciate the nod to the franchise or B) have no fucking clue that Bomberman was an actual game.

If there is any other way to piss a friend off, it’s blowing them up

The game honestly is a unique treasure in the sea of Call of Duty– and Destiny-styled games. It’s rare to find a game that you can enjoy with real life people sitting next to you these days, and Brawl does not disappoint.
Either way, it’s an awesome good time to play, and believe that I’ll be playing it with Plasma Captain and the rest of the TandemShock family!
Want some video to make up your mind? Check out the Trailer for Brawl below and let us know what you think in the comments below!