BRAWL

Bloober Team's second attempt to deliver a decent game turns out to be... well, a decent game. The multiplayer is especially amusing, though it won't win any awards (and definitely not for its lacklustre single-player).

Brawl is far from perfect, with an online multiplayer that appears to be devoid of other players and a single player campaign that halts your progress with an insane difficulty spike. Despite these shortcomings it is a solid party game if you have a friend or three that wants to play, and considering how rare it is in this day and age to find a game that supports this kind of multiplayer, I am impressed.

Leaps and bounds ahead of their previous effort, Brawl might not be the most polished title available and the dark setting certainly feels overdone but as a multiplayer party title, the game arguably brings the thrills where it counts.

The frame rate isn’t great all the time but it’s mostly functional and the comically dark atmosphere seems to be more attractive. Perhaps it just feels less drab and dreary. At any rate, it’s worth trying if you’ve always loved Bomberman.

The game is unforgiving when it comes to the AI, and some players can learn from this while others will be destroyed constantly, which is unfortunate. With some tweaking here and there and adding difficulty levels, BRAWL could be amazing.

It is obviously based on the well-known Bomberman gameplay, but it was fun back on the MSX, and it still is. It isn't particularly original, but it works.

Brawl is fun when you play it on local multiplayer, it has enjoyable game modes and an interesting variety on its playable characters. Unfortunately an unbalanced single player mode and some technical problems let the game far from the perfection. It’s thousands of times better than Basement Crawl, a decent game.

Rather, everything does, and for that, Bloober deserves congratulations — more in the form of a subtle nod than a hearty pat on the back, mind you, but still: this is infinitely better than Basement Crawl ever was, and even if it's still not a must-own for your PS4, you won't find yourself wishing that Brawl had never even been created.

Brawl corrects many of the serious problems that plagued its predecessor, but unfortunately it keeps other, compromising some of what could have been a total redemption in the eyes of the public.

If you are fond of Bomberman, and in search for some quick paced fun, Brawl might please you, but there much polish missing in the tutorial and in the balancing of the single player experience.

Ultimately, Brawl falls well short of being a great game. The control issues and, in my personal experience, difficulty finding players to match up with fail to capitalize on the visual design and setting.

Not even close to being a good game, but it's much better than the previous versions. It's like bomberman with a somber setting in so many ways, even technically speaking.

Brawl is Bloober Teams redemption for Basement Crawl, which failed miserably. Now they make up for it with a much better version of the game. In the multiplayer it offers a lot of fun, but there still is a long way to go.

Despite having a perfect soundtrack and wonderfully creepy voice-over, Brawl’s single-player misses the mark thanks to its insane difficulty.

Brawl is without a doubt a better game than last year's Basement Crawl, but it's still only a curiosity for fans of party games.

Brawl wants to be a dark take on party games, and while the aesthetic somewhat holds up its end of the bargain the actual game part leaves a lot to be desired.