Recent reviews by Shffl | N64

Game is fun!

I've seen many call this game "Smash Brothers meets Pong" and that's roughly correct. Lethal League is similar to Smash titles in its ease of access (being pretty simple to understand and play) and its competitive depth. Its similar to Pong in being focused around the ball, the one lethal element of the game. You and your opponent(s) are striving to hit this ball, tagging it to yourself and making it lethal to your opponent until they successfully hit it back (or miss, get hit, and die). The ball will steadily speed up after every hit as long as players remain alive, ramping up the intensity. Continue this until all but one player have lost all their lives, and only the champion remains!

Local and online multiplayer are supported, with 2-4 players. You can play 1v1, FFA, teams, or strikers (similar to soccer) modes. There are a couple different ball types you can try as well to mix things up, along with general options (stock count, time limit, etc.) There is matchmaking, but it's not skill-based (the community isn't large enough to support skill-based matchmaking anyways).

The game is great if you want to just hit buttons and peg your friends with baseballs, and also great if you're looking for something with competitive depth. While the execution barrier is fairly low, you have a lot of freedom of movement/options, and the smarter and more experienced player is still favored to win. Regardless, the game does a great job of hypeing the player up, as hits take progressively longer to complete as the ballspeed increases (giving the feeling of them putting more and more force into the ball), and the screen starts to shake, the background changes, 'impact distortions' occur, all the colors go negative, characters get speed afterimages, and finally the stage goes completely white if you get the ballspeed up enough. Each notch of this progressively makes things more intense, especially the first time you see them!

The only drawbacks to me of this game is the playerbase size and occasional crashes. This game has seen occasional boons in playerbase (usually following sales), but on average there's about 60-100 people playing at a time. Games go fairly quick, and you usually won't be waiting more than a minute in quickmatch queue (at least during peak EU and NA hours), but you may run into the same people multiple times. What you don't have in quantity, though, you do have in quality. There's almost always a few people in the group chat willing to play, and many are experienced players who are welcoming and helpful. The competitive LL community is, overall, one of the best communities I've been in.

The other drawback is a recurring crash that can occur in multiplayer games of more than 2 people. This only occurs maybe once every 6-7 games, but it can get annoying fairly quick. Fortunately, the game loads almost instantly, so getting back in the action is fast. It's annoying but manageable.

I highly suggest you try this game out, especially if you have friends to play it with. $15 may be a bit expensive for some (it was well worth it for me, 450 hours of play and counting), but I would definitely recommend this to anyone at $10 or less.