Yet more brainless shovelware, Brawl Brothers is a beatemup where you move to the right while mashing your attack button, occasionally shifting around so that the staggering zombie-AI enemies don’t gang up on you such that you will actually take damage. Like most beatemups of this era and afterwards, gameplay is almost entirely designed to simulate herding a pack of retarded feral babies around a small space the size of an elevator, so that you may more effectively beat them.
The character selection list is painfully derivative as well – a beefy Ryu lookalike, a ninja, another ninja (but female), some generic guy, and a hilarious M. Bison clone. For some reason, it made me choose two characters, but I only got to play one.
I am guessing the characters play almost identically, given that you have three buttons – attack, jump and special – and little to work with in terms of button combinations.
This game is a weaksauce example of the genre that Batman Returns proudly exemplifies as potentially enjoyable on the short-term. It’s an attempt to cash in on that genre, in an era where reviews were hard to find and kids would buy an eighty-dollar cartridge every year, selecting them based on badassitude of title and cover picture, blindly fumbling for quality games in a fog of ignorance that was only dispelled by the rise of the internet.
Brawl Brothers is, plainly, boring garbage.
The characters are actually different and unique… but when the game offers only one direction, being unique is just a consolation prize.
For the record, I like seeing waves of colorful thungs skidding across the screen; it’s a cheap laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.