Recent reviews by Wattmelon

No joke - this is easily the best platform fighter on the market at the moment. While the base roster isn't as massive as the scope of games like Smash, each character in this game is incredibly unique, well-designed, and fun to play. The inner mechanics of the game also have a ton of unique depth and complexity to them, while also being close enough to other platform fighters to feel right at home for those who enjoy games like Melee and Project M.

Online for Rivals is a bit hit-or-miss, but not because of the netcode by any means (hell, the *delay-based* netcode for this game is leagues better than any other platform fighter I've played). With the community being smaller and more devoted, it's gonna be harder for newer players to find matches with people on their same skill level through quickplay/ranked. Also while the rollback netcode *is* really good, it's still a bit buggy in its current state? Really the bigger issue is in whether or not you're willing to join community Discords to find potentially better matches, or sift through online quickplay to find higher skill-level players that might kick your ass out the gate.

And lastly, Workshop... Workshop takes this game from a 9/10 to, like, a 13/10 if you ask me. There's a TON of replay value in finding new and exciting characters to play as, whether that's the funny broken characters or the close-to-home remakes of characters from other fighting games. However, if you dig around enough to find some of the competitively legal original characters on Workshop, you're in for some of the wildest and most inventive character designs I've ever seen in any platform fighter ever, even relative to Rivals' base cast. And the greatest part is that all of these tools to make these characters are super accessible and easy to understand! Sure, you probably won't make the greatest character known to man on your first go-around, but you can generally figure out the tools to make a character after your first pass - just be ready for 90% of the project to go into animations, and 10% into coding ^^'

Overall, if I could recommend this game multiple times over, I totally would. It's definitely worth your time if you enjoy platform fighters or want to get into them, especially now with the release of 4 new characters in the base game, as well as public rollback netcode.

This game is honestly really fun, even if I have my gripes with it. If you're going into this expecting it to feel like a Smash-style platform fighter, you're probably not gonna have a great time with it. With the game having digital inputs instead of analog, movement is gonna feel clunky the first time you pick it up. Instant dashing and fast-falling aren't in the game, due to those relying on analog inputs to work. There also aren't horizontal aerials, though I personally don't think this is a huge issue. It's a lot of small things that can make the game disorienting when you first play it, but it's all things you can definitely learn with enough time.

I do have a few complaints with the game though. My biggest one has to be the platform fall-through mechanic, where you have to press Down+Jump to fall through platforms. I totally understand how this works on paper, and I've seen it in platformers before, but in the context of a plat fighter it doesn't work very well in practice. Maybe giving players the option to double-tap down instead of pressing Down+Jump might be a good idea? Also arcade mode feels pretty lacking at the moment. Hopefully future updates can add some extra polish to the mode to give it its own unique identity. Polish in general is something the game needs a lot of currently ^^'

Character diversity is another thing the game needs. Outside of a few exceptions, pretty much every light attack in the game feels really similar, especially since almost every light comes out on frame 6. Specials switch up the game a bit, but I feel like a lot more could have been done frame data-wise to make each character feel more unique and personalized. A friend of mine put it best by saying "it feels like you're fighting the system more than the characters." Because of how similar the frame data is between characters, the general gameplan for fighting every character is about as similar, which can make the game overall feel bland after a short while.

Overall, the game feels more like a very promising early-access than a full game release. I'd still recommend getting Nick All-Star Brawl, though do it while it's on sale, since at the time of writing this, I wouldn't consider the game worth the full $50 price tag. The game has a lot of promise though, and knowing Ludosity, I'm sure the game can only get better from here.