Videogame Reviews

Super Smash Brothers Brawl
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Publisher: Nintendo
1-4 Players
ESRB Rating: T for Teens

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the third installment in the Super Smash Bros. Series, following the series tradition of being the only action game combining several Nintendo characters into one fighting mash-up. (Brawl also features some third-party characters). Controllers compatible with Brawl include the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, Wii remote (held sideways), the Classic Controller and the Nintendo Gamecube controller.

From the main menu, players have the option of selecting different modes: Group, Solo and Nintendo Wifi. Group is a multiplayer mode that allows a group of friends in the same location to play together. Players can play standard matches, set up rules for special matches, and set up tournaments. Solo mode includes classic matches, an adventure mode, events, stadium and training. Solo mode is designed as a single player experience although a local second player can join you for everything except for the classic matches. Nintendo Wi-Fi connection is for online play against other players.

Super Smash Brothers is unique in that the franchise only has health bars for enemies. Playable characters and opponents who use playable characters have damage percentage, the higher their percentage meter goes, the further they will fly off platforms.

Classic gives players a number of enemies to defeat in stages in order to advance. Events has specific objectives to complete. Stadium includes target smash, home-run contest, multi-man brawl and boss battles. Target smash has players break 10 targets as fast as they can. The home-run contest has players use a bat to smash a sandbag object to fly across a field and records how far it has flown. Multi-man brawl lets players defeat all enemies in different types of matches. The training area allows players to practice different moves on an enemy.


A story-driven action mode. At the beginning, players are introduced to several characters before jumping right into the first battle, with the choice between playing as Mario or Kirby. Afterwards, the story progresses from there. Each new level is introduced with a computer graphic cut scene, all of which are very interesting to watch. Every character's role in the storyline intertwines with one another in an impressive combination. There is no dialogue between the characters, the characters relay messages to each other by using hand motions. Surprisingly, this works out well with little confusion as to what is going on.

The story mode is a mix of a platforming and beat-'em-up adventure. All the levels in the first play through give players options to choose which character they want to take control of first, second and up to a fourth character. If players run out of lives, they can choose to continue and will be brought back to the beginning of the area where they had died. Once a level is completed, players can go back to any previous level by selecting it on the main map and replay the level over again with any character on their roster.

Playing through the story mode allows players to unlock characters, collect various trophies, extra lives, stickers and music. Stickers can be used to power-up characters, by placing them on a circle in the sticker option on the main map. While this can make your characters more powerful, there is only a limited amount of space given, and stickers can not overlap one another. If players remove previously stickers, they will lose that sticker. While this idea seems neat, having the space full already makes collecting any future stickers seem pointless.

The camera stays at a zoomed out view that increases when characters are knocked off platforms. There are a number of side-scrolling levels and a few variations on each. Some levels have the camera moving on it's own so that the player must move across the screen or else they will be left behind and lose a life. Sometimes it can feel agonizingly slow to wait for the camera to move so you can see where to go next. Other times, it can feel a little too fast when trying to fight off a bunch of enemies. The camera also brings up another problem where sometimes enemies can be half way off the screen, making it very difficult to fight, this problem was more common when fighting bosses on flat ground (rather than on a platform).

Clipping errors are prevalent throughout the game, usually only minor, but are very noticeable. Sometimes enemies and characters will collide into one another as well as other objects.


Allows players to play with friends or with anyone online. Players can choose to fight each other or team up together to take on enemies. With friends only, players can play the same home-run contest found in the stadium in Solo mode. After choosing a character and stage, players wait for others to join, and during this time a practice area is presented with a punching bag object to practice on before the match begins.

There was some lag encountered in some matches, and it seems to hit at certain times in the day more than others. Nintendo has already responded to complaints about the online quality saying that they have seen improvement in online performance everyday since launch, so players should be hopeful to see that the online service will continue to improve.


Also in the Vault, there is a mini-game called "Coin Launcher," in which players shoot coins they've gathered (which accumulate throughout the game) for a chance to gather new stickers and trophies. The coins are used as ammo to shoot various objects and trophies. Once trophies are hit, it becomes part of player's trophy collection.

SSBB is a fun game and should be of interest to fans of previous iterations and fans of beat-em-up style games who are new to the series. Overall, most characters feel very balanced out, only a few characters seem to deal more damage than others and only a few seem to share similar moves. If your a fan of the genre, you probably won't be disappointed in picking this up.

Category: Nintendo Wii
Posted by Brukaoru at 6:30 PM |