Initial thoughts & first four character stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zPQL6bNlAI

This game is a stylish, funny, and overall fun-to-play take on the fighting game genre, blending the worlds of Lethal League, Smash and - ultimately - the core tenets of Pong. In it, you play as members of the titular Club, full of up-and-coming wizards with their unique abilities and playstyles. During combat, you don't actually hit the other characters, but need to protect the "flask" on the edge of your side of the board, which will get more damaged as enemy attacks hit it. Get hit too much and you lose the round. You can prevent this by deflecting shots, using your unique abilities (and Ultimate moves!!) and distracting the enemy with your own barrage of attacks. Each member of the cast is distinct in their own way and have genuinely pretty neat and interesting designs.

Importantly, the game feels good to play; the movement is fluid, the art is quite nice (and full of little background jokes) and the maps and cast of characters is diverse enough to make every bout feel a little different than the last. There are clearly characters who are better suited to different players' interests; some are more offensive-based and aim to assault the enemy with an array of shots, while others rely more on outsmarting the opponent with well-timed abilities and ricocheting/deflecting shots back at the attacker.

In addition to the gameplay, as it currently stands on the Early Access release, a large part of the appeal is the story mode - I found the plot for the current cast of 4 characters and overall dialogue between them to be pretty good, witty, and genuinely funny. The stories all tie together in a fairly cohesive manner, and I expect that to continue as more folks are included in the single-player cast. There's also fun little mini-games in each story, and I particularly loved the surprise and delight of Mooscles' (the minotaur's) one. I won't spoil it ;)

Unfortunately, given that I played this moments after release, there wasn't anybody online to combat - but I think this has a lot of potential for being a good party/versus/online fighting game, especially as more of it gets fleshed out through the early access process.

I also think it's important to note that my gameplay time at review reflects just going through those first couple stories - I did not do any of the offline versus with the additional characters or anything online. With double the amount of stories coming through, it looks like there'll be at least 6 - 8 hours of story gameplay and potentially much more with the modes outside of that. Overall, if you're looking for a cool, stylish, funny, and overall interesting fighting game to try out, I think you should give this one a shot!