Within five minutes of playing Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl , I’m trying to wavedash around Jellyfish Fields as Patrick. I’m suddenly interrupted by a Catdog main, who spikes me off the map. It should be crushing; match after match I’m three stocked online, but I just cannot stop bloody smiling the whole time. I feel like I’m eight years old again, playing Super Smash Bros. Melee with my brothers, losing every single match and having the time of my life.
Right from the first trailer, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl brought back memories of binging SpongeBob games on the GameCube after school. It feels lovingly crafted by devs who had this childhood too, but it puts its gameplay first, and nostalgia second.
The memes had me terrified: everyone expected developer Ludosity to come out with the "Smash Killer". No game could ever be that. But somehow, this small studio that was thrown into the spotlight just weeks ago has brought out a fighting game that at least gives Smash Ultimate some competition. While recent Smash titles brought final smashes, more items, and overall just slower gameplay, All-Star Brawl Stars Zone provides the fast-paced competitive play many of us have been dying for since Melee all those years ago.
And damn, do these devs love Melee. The respect it has for the second Smash game is bashing you in the face in every fight. Everything is lightning fast and every move counts. There are no items, no final smashes, no gimmicks alongside the fighting - All-Star Brawl trusts its players enough to find fun in zipping across the map and beating the hell out of each other as cartoon characters. It doesn’t need to be a party game, it’s confident that fighting games can be just as fun on their own.
A big part of what makes All-Star Brawl so fun, even in the face of defeat, is how approachable it can be. Sure, the controls suck at first - I will die on the hill that up should be ‘jump’ - but once you have it figured out, you can start pulling off tech with the best of them. I have probably performed around three wavedashes in my many hours of Melee, but in All-Star Brawl I’ve got April O’Neil gliding across the map like it’s nothing, feeling like I’ve won Evo when I race over to Powdered Toastman and smack him with a microphone stand. I might even go on to lose the match, but that quick taste of glory keeps me coming back.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl admittedly doesn’t come with a lot of ways to play. Everything I’ve just spoken about comes from my time in the online lobbies - which run fantastically - because single player, while fun, is incredibly barebones. This is easily one of its major failings as a Smash clone.
There are the two-to-four player battles, which can either be with stocks or timed. There’s also an arcade mode, which is serviceable enough, but doesn’t inject enough charm into its design, when there’s no reason it couldn’t be like the reference-filled arcade in Melee. There is zero narrative in arcade mode, or anywhere else for that matter. Characters don’t even interact with each other in any of the game modes outside of a couple of one-liners in a text box, which are random quotes rather than actual conversations. There are no Injustice-style taunts here. That feels like a huge miss when there are some wonderfully daft ways they can create rivalries among the cast.
The only variety you can add to the mix otherwise comes in sports mode. But shooting footballs into goals just slows down what’s meant to be a fast game, and doesn’t meaningfully pad out the single player offerings. It’s all saved by how ridiculously well designed the combat is, but Smash’s more casual elements are lacking.
Few others will be buying the game where SpongeBob fights Nigel Thornberry and Reptar for the combat though. There’s a reason why we’ve been following every announcement from the game’s development: the cartoons themselves. Unfortunately, this is another area Smash has it beat, and by quite a margin - but not for a lack of trying.
On the one hand, you can feel Ludosity wringing as much out of these IPs as possible, painstakingly trying to showcase these characters we love. Yet equally, you feel that something - either time constraints or copyright issues - is holding Ludosity back. There’s no voice lines, no music, and no alternate costumes. It feels like somebody with money and decision making power didn’t believe in this game. All things considered, it speaks to the devs’ talent that we got a good charm out of the game without these things, almost exclusively through its fantastic movesets , and taunts that reference iconic moments or famous memes . But this is a ridiculous tug-of-war that should never have happened.
Not all of its failings come down to the lack of homage paid to the source material either. While the game plays brilliantly on PS4, another writer at TheGamer didn’t fare as well on Xbox Series X, reporting constant performance drops and tearing. Having had one of us on every platform so far, this seems very Xbox specific, with both PS4 and PS5 holding up, so that’s likely the one to avoid.
All things considered, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a Melee fan project, first and foremost. It’s got the cute Nick paint thrown on it, but the fighting is what you should come here for, even if the cartoon characters had you hooked in the first place.
And that’s the funny thing about all of this. As the Smash Bros. comparisons kept pouring in throughout development, I thought the devs would be terrified that the gameplay wouldn’t live up to the hype.
But that wasn’t the case at all. Ludosity has truly created a fighting game to rival Smash Ultimate as far as gameplay is concerned. It fell short on the extra trimmings - we bloody love hearing characters yell out generic fighting dialogue, don’t we? If you were welling up over Sora getting in Smash, the tears probably started falling when you heard Haley Joel Osment’s voice. And when we get new DLC packs, we’re almost as hyped about the new soundtrack as we are about the characters. So when every stage here has one music track, and none of them are from the shows, you really feel its absence.
With DLC on the way, there’s (hopefully) no reason why Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl couldn’t get these things. But there’s no guarantee.
Right now, All-Star Brawl stands on its own two feet, not trying to be Smash Ultimate now that its DLC has dried up, but trying to show us a good ‘ol nostalgic time. It lulls you in with its lightning flash fights and accessible combat, keeping a grin on your face throughout.
Basically, don’t come here because the recent Battle for Bikini Bottom remaster got you in the mood for some SpongeBob humour. Come here because you want to see SpongeBob beat the crap out of Nigel Thornberry, and find your own humour in that.
Score 4/5. A PlayStation 4 code was provided by the publisher.
