Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab The idea of a Super Smash Bros.-style platform fighter that brings together some of Nickelodeon’s most beloved cartoons across multiple generations is one that just makes so much sense, and it’s kind of a wonder that it’s taken this long for something like Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl to come around. But despite Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s clear inspirations, developer Ludosity has made a notable effort to differentiate its mechanics and the overall flow of combat from Smash Bros., resulting in a fighter that is way faster than any Smash game has been since Melee in 2001. ROMSLAB.COM BEST SWITCH GAMES

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab

This puts All-Star Brawl in a great spot as an alternative to Smash Ultimate that’s available on practically every platform – but its subpar use of its wealth of source material, along with a general lack of polish and a few irksome mechanics, does mean it’s not a recommendation that comes without a few significant caveats. The first thing that comes across while playing All-Star Brawl is that this feels like a game made on a pretty tight budget. The character models and backgrounds lack detail, the original themes made for each level are extremely generic, there’s just one barebones single-player arcade mode, a barely worth mentioning Sports Mode, and zero meaningful unlockables or progression rewards outside of some images and songs in a jukebox.

20 themed levels

But perhaps the most damning thing of all is that, despite being a game all about celebrating Nickelodeon’s finest, there’s very little Nickelodeon charm that comes through. There’s no voice acting, no remixes of any themes from the many cartoons featured, and while the stages are littered with fun Easter eggs for fans to discover, it all just feels kind of soulless. There aren’t all that many games in the sub-genre of “platform fighters,” but there’s a good reason for that–the genre is absolutely dominated by the 1000-pound gorilla that is Super Smash Bros. Yes, there are other games that look to put their own spin on Smash’s formula, but they don’t have anywhere near the same kind of reach or appeal as Nintendo’s beloved brawler. Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon Switch NSP

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab

Enter Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, a game with a roster of nostalgic characters that is very clearly modeling itself on Smash, from the controls to the stage and game formats all the way down to how the interface is designed–but with several elements catering to Smash’s competitive sub-community. The premise is simple: A bunch of your favorite Nickelodeon characters (from the early ’90s Nicktoons era to the present day) are all, for reasons unclear, trying to blast each other off of various themed levels. This is accomplished the same way as you do in Smash Bros.: smack around an enemy a bunch to get their damage percentage higher and increase their launchability before whacking them with a power move to blow them out-of-bounds.

Character

The gameplay will be instantly familiar to Smash players, but newcomers to platform fighters shouldn’t have much of a problem picking up SpongeBob, Reptar, and Korra and doing some cool moves. Every fighter has an array of normal and special attacks on the ground and in the air, along with a throw and shield. That isn’t to say it’s exactly like Smash, as there are some key changes to set All-Star Brawl apart. One example is in the controls. You have three attack buttons: normal, strong attack, and special attack, along with a dedicated jump button. Smash’s “Tilt” moves, where you move the analog stick slightly in one direction and press the normal attack button, are instead remapped to D-pad or analog stick plus normal attack button in All-Star Brawl. TT Isle of Man Ride on the Edge Switch NSP

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab

This is a very clever way to implement these attacks while reducing the odds of a wrong input, and as someone who frequently overshoots the tilt threshold in Smash, I greatly appreciated it. Also welcome is a dedicated “strafe” button to keep a character facing a specific direction while moving around the arenas. Advanced mechanics familiar to Smash faithful, like wavedashing, perfect guarding, and attack priority, have been deliberately emphasized and expanded upon. Players who want to dig deep into the game systems and compete with others will find a lot here to enhance their experience. The training mode has some unique and interesting features, including a full hitbox viewer–an extremely useful tool that very few fighting games include as a feature–and the ability to advance frame-by-frame to study move properties and interactions on a highly detailed level.

All-Star Brawl also offers rollback netcode for online play.

Rollback has become greatly preferred by competitive gaming enthusiasts over the more common delay-based netcode, so seeing it in All-Star Brawl shows a genuine commitment to that particular audience–though in my testing, it still proved to be a bit iffy through long-distance or Wi-Fi-based online connections. Overall, there’s plenty of meat to dig into here for those who want a mechanically rich platform fighter that isn’t quite a Smash game, but still close enough. So Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is mechanically sound, which is great. But for a game that’s trying very hard to put up a serious fight against Smash, it falls short in significant ways. TT Isle of Man Ride on the Edge 2 Switch NSP

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5 Free Download Romslab

The main reason Smash Bros. is such a runaway success is that the game works on numerous levels: as a competitive game, as a party game, and as a showcase for fan-service. You can play Smash with a strictly competitive ruleset, or you can turn on all of the items and play on the blatantly cruel stages to goof off. You can even ignore multiplayer altogether and sink hours into a variety of single-player content options while enjoying all the Nintendo fan-service and gaming references. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, in comparison, gets the competitive element right, but everything else is severely lacking. There are no wacky, overpowered items at all, and while a couple of the stage designs do present interesting challenges and hazards, most of them feel pretty restrained, both in terms of presentation and the dangers they provide.

Note: This game will only run on consoles with the original firmware that are connected to the PSN online account and purchased the game from PSN.

Add-ons (DLC): Nickelodeon All Star Brawl PS5