Recent reviews by eskbeemo

Clearly punch-out inspired ,but an alteration of mechanics to provide a unique flavor end up falling flat.

If you go into this expecting punch out the cadence is entirely off. instead of waiting for the opponent to attack then punish the game allows you to throw punches randomly which is odd cause you start off waiting for opponents attacks to punish and makes the game feel very slow. From this point you should wipe your memory of punchout and start wailing. I presume it was meant to make the game less straight forward and more scappy but mashing punch to then either hit the counter timer if they randomly block enough or just start up an attack and muscle through your punches.

The dodging mechanics also differ from punchout, this game you can hold for a while but it makes it really weird when u "dodge" an attack but it lingers so long that your hold times out which doesn't feel good. in punch out block and dodge were not as crucial as left right and timing since you couldn't hold the dodge. This games attacks have some difficult readability on attacks in distinguished what you can block vs what to dodge.

biggest atrocity is the final boss at time of writing. it sorta exemplifies the subjectively bad design choices. he doesnt block so u keep wailing and unload supers is the idea. he has a lingering attack that shows off the dodge timing thing and lingers a bit to long even when dodged last second. the attack also poisons on the last tick of damage instead of the initial and when u take damage from poison ticks it seems like your characters animation is interrupted to go into the damage state which then returns you to neutral to get hit by something. the final phase has a 4 hit move that 1 taps with each swipe it seems and u just gotta figure out each one but its the dodge vs block thing again and its annoying to use whole health bar to learn an attack, or if it doesn't kill you its puts you in the awful zoomed in state where the boss is so wide you have to go off audio ques which might bug when interacting with the low health effect

Icing on the cake for the last boss (at time of writing more content is promised) is having difficulty options for every fight then not having them for the last boss. This rarely happens in games ,but its aggravating to think about people who need the lower difficulties hitting such a huge spike in difficulty in an attempt to preserve the "special-ness" of the last boss.I still beat it but if people are playing at the difficulty they find appropriate for themselves, its really strange to take that option away from people last second. Seems like the difficulty options were damage/health multipliers anyways on the surface

I really want to give the game a pass for the genre and for the incredible art but its just not for me and if you have any punch-out blood in you then it will be a foreign and aggravating experience. if you haven't played punch-out and it looks good maybe give it shot

If the game looks interesting to you give it a shot, the shop is really easy to ignore. Class based, team heavy pvp first person shooter with a large cast of heroes to master. Blizz pretty much sacrificed every other aspect of the game and only made the pvp better which is the core gameplay at least

Casually fun first and foremost its a scramble heavy game that you can just feel good pressing buttons cause they all feel pretty unique and special/usable. I enjoy that the "normals" can do special feeling things instead of in other platform fighters where a character mostly rely on exchanging normals. Its a hard feeling to put into words but its like when you realize that spamming mario tornado on smash64 isnt your best option and that you should be using your tilts and normals. Since the buttons feel like special moves (atleast for who ive played) theres a bit of magic there. (sorta like the dnf design )

Thoughts on cooldowns:
Traditional fighting games handling of cool downs always felt awkward to me, usually its handled like you can use the motion input or the shortcut but if you use the shortcut the move goes on cool down. It did not really sit right with me and was an awkward balancing mechanic but i understand the appeal of making your game accessible from a business/marketing standpoint

cool downs in this game on the other hand are a balancing factor and you can have big powerful moves with a cooldown. not Wario waft tier but serviceable. I could say that's my favorite aspect of the game. it allow velma to fire homing projectiles that if they had no cooldown would just juggle and follow you infinitely so the move wouldn't have a chance to exist. with CDs it is a zoning tool that u can blow all charges of or space em out and keep one handy to help ally or create an approach opportunity behind a homing fireball

Throughts on armored moves:
Least would probably be armored moves. some characters have multiple some have one but in a 2 v2 environment when your partner is getting hit and you try to save them it sucks that your attempt is twarted by armor and now you are also caught up in the move. I think it would help the feel of the game greatly if they reduced armored moves prevalence and definitely limit it to one per kit so if someone spams it, it gets decay at least. In the chaotic design environment of 2 v 2 with no friendly fire where everyone's throwing there moves onto the pile the armored move comes out supreme

Production value:
Top notch voice acting quips character interactions and references

Competitive analysis tools.
There is a training mode, theres a bot to beat up and you can have it do standard actions and moves .
theres is no way to analyze hitboxes at the moment which helps the community crack the game and find solutions to annoying moves so I think it would be beneficial for the games longevity.

Thoughts on F2p aspect:
If I like a f2p game and with my current job and can afford to skip the waiting/grinding aspect. My views on it have shifting from min maxing f2p aspects to I just wanna have fun playing who I want to play but I dont want to have to detract from my other hobbies to min max my daily earnings in a f2p game. I always have a particular hangup with fighting games where I hate having an incomplete roster so I just bought everyone. Apparently its like 60-100 matches to earn a character which doesnt sound too bad for how many matches you can get through. I will say with new playing gold influx and the weekly rotating characters your gonna wanna find a main to buy first before the character you like rotates out

Stages:
The stages are not notable bar one stage with a roof that everyone hates, but im sure enough people will state their disdain for the stage something will happen

overall its a fun romp, completely playable and it feels good win or lose. if you think about it to hard you may hurt yourself though. #1 Advice i could give to enjoy this game (or any game) is don't go into it expecting it to emulate another game just take it at face value.

Nice free game creation engine. The biggest weakness of the engine (being 3d games) is being addressed in the next major version ,4.0, so it may be a good time to get into learning godot and then get used to the environment then dive into the new 3d tools when they drop. The community is passionate and there are teams that crank out lots of tutorials with the appeal being a lot of the tutorials are localized to a few groups instead of many 1 off videos across youtube (talking about GDQuest)

As someone who has played the other games and only partly through the first half I can safely say it satisfies the itch.

Fun and addicting. Easy to hop in and play a few rounds. I played more on console and just felt like leaving another positive review

The design philosophy behind creating characters is was makes this game amazing. As much of a meme "what does down B do is" its summarizes the characters well and what their central gimmick is. The impact each character can have on the stage and control space is something that sets this game apart. Since the characters are not tied to representing any famous IPs it allows the move list to be more about a coherent kit and less about cameos/ being faithful to source material

As of 2/3/2022 rollback has been added as well

Masterpiece visually and gameplay wise. A boss rush game no one should miss out on playing

You can host an online lobby with the clockwork expansion and people who don't own it can join if you wanted to try some coop

A fine digital adaptation of the physical game. The physical game has lots of small rules that can very easily go under the radar so being able to play a digital adaption can help solidify ones understanding of the rules. Hopefully the other expansions come soon.