Recent reviews by Beccanical

Brawlhalla is a highly polished arena-knockout fighting game. Calling it a "Super Smash Bros. clone" would be to do it an injustice. It's fun, challenging, and it's clear that a lot of care has gone into crafting the mechanics and aesthetics.

There are three enormous pros to Brawlhalla right off the bat:

1. It's free. Playing the game—even the fun, unranked modes—gives you gold, which you can use to buy characters (called "Legends"), or you can play the others on a free rotation. If you buy the All Legends pack with real money, you can instead spend your gold on elite colours for every Legend to show how awesome and generally desirable you are.
2. It will run on practically anything. I get about 10 FPS in DotA 2 on minimal graphics settings, but I run Brawlhalla at a perfect framerate.
3. The devs update the game frequently. New Legends, new maps, balance changes, cosmetics to buy (with real money, if you're not cheap like me), even new casual modes. You can expect this to continue long after the game's official release.

Beyond those three major benefits, there are other selling points:

1. Easy to learn, hard to master.
2. Can be taken as seriously as you want—there are fun game modes like bombsketball and switchcraft, and there's two ranked modes with decent populations even on the Australian server.
3. Because the game is based around predicting your opponent, you feel like a badass when you pull off a long string.
4. You can play as a ninja, a minotaur, a pirate, or an Ulgrim. What's an Ulgrim? It doesn't matter, just play him.
5. Lots of awesome movement and attack techniques to practice, like ledge cancels, gravity cancels, and momentum dodges.
6. It actually looks really awesome even before you start having badass fights between mythical heroes.
7. There's a competitive scene, with regular tournaments that offer actual money as prizes. You can even watch those tournaments using the power of the internet. It's pretty rad. Maybe git gud and win a tournament?

Like in the Super Smash Bros. series, kills are based on being knocked out of the arena rather than direct health damage. Taking damage increases the amount of knockback dealt to you. This means that with careful play you can survive while heavily hurt or kill your opponents when they barely damaged.

In Brawlhalla, every weapon has a set of attacks common to all Legends that use it. All the Legends have a unique combination of 2 weapons, with 6 unique signature attacks split evenly between the 2. Legends also have statistics which control things like how much damage they do, how fast they attack, how much damage they take, and how fast they move.

The net effect is that all Legends put an interesting twist on a common core, allowing you to learn how to play with or against them quickly while still keeping it interesting. This is a game you can learn in hours, not weeks, and you'll be having fun from minute 1.

Ultimately, going into depth about the mechanics is not going to sell anyone on this game. I could drone on and on, thoroughly boring you, but it's free and it'll take no time at all to either hook you or turn you off it, so give it a try.

Play Brawlhalla. Pick Ulgrim. Achieve enlightenment. Ascend to a higher plane of existence, wherein stars and atoms dance entwined and all the secrets of the universe are known. Then lance side air until your enemy is dead, because even in the infinite multiverse there is no mercy from Ulgrim.