Bring it back to the fighting genre’s basics with Creepy Brawlers, from developer Mega Cat Studios. Originally released in 2017 as a retrofitted NES cartridge game, Creepy Brawlers is now out for the Nintendo Switch for $5 USD.
At its core, Creepy Brawlers is a thinly-veiled Halloween version of the legendary title, Punch-Out!!. Really it could be called a tribute or a pastiche of the heavyweight champion of classic fighting games as the development of this project surely smacks of nostalgia. Overall, it’s a fraught and fractured fighting game riding its basic control scheme and to its breaking point.
Float like a Butterfly
What sparks the imagination more surely than anything else? Limitations. They enable choices to be made, conflict to naturally arise, and form to take to structure. Just like how the negative spaces of a painting contribute just as much, if not more, to its overall meaning. In Creepy Brawlers, the limitation is the technology and Mega Cat Studios have used it partially to their advantage.
For what Creepy Brawlers does right, it deserves credit and its fluid control system is so easy to pick up that I was already feeling a little bit like Mike Tyson in my first few fights. Learning the simple controls–Left and Right punches, High and Low punches, blocking and dodging for counter combos–gives Creepy Brawlers an arcade, flash-game quality which lends itself towards quick sessions that anybody can pick up and put down.
The combat system is directly inspired by Punch-Out!!, but the variety of Halloween monster challengers demanding different playstyles showcase the developer’s originality. Ramping up in difficulty (and sometimes finickiness), the tournament challenges dictate fighting through the easy monsters at the start in order to attempt moving past the harder ones at the end.
And even though there is a practice system that allowed me to bypass the pressure to make every run through the lower brackets count, the best moments I had came from finally besting the end-of-the-road challengers I had slogged to by going through their lessers (again).
Sting Like a … Bumbling Bee?
However, its few moments of glory are embedded in an overall more frustrating experience. Punctuated in my memories are my cursed attempts to precisely time the patterned movements, attacks, and blocks of my challengers only to be slightly off a note and massively punished.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the puzzle quality that fighting games engender, but it feels especially bad when you know its the game’s finicky nature instead of my fat fingers that makes progressing through such a slog.
The game itself and its variety of challengers isn’t necessarily that difficult, but getting the game inputs to cooperate with consistent outputs was a challenge. On top of that, the biggest difficulty for me was having to beat the same challenges over and over to get to the challenge that I was actually stuck at. Instead of fun, fast-paced fighting, I experienced monotonous repetition and wasted time.
And worst of all, my game didn’t save properly after sinking 4 hours beating the first tournament run, and I lost all of my achievements as well. Talk about discouraging replayability.
Overall
At the end of the day, I’m not expecting the next Punch-Out!! or anything beyond what NES hardware could support, but I can’t endorse Creepy Brawlers as much more than a poorly executed homage to Punch-Out!!.
The combat controls are easy to pick up and the quickness of fights does well on the portable Nintendo Switch, but beneath that surface of retro-fighting puzzler are layers of frustration and disappointment.
Score: 5.5 / 10
Check Out the Creepy Brawlers Video:
For more information, please visit: https://games.megacatstudios.com/creepybrawlers/
Nintendo Switch Review
Recent Michigan State University grad and current Game Studies researcher who plays fantasy RPG's to escape, Smash to compete, and Stardew to chill. Also have a +1 to rage/toxicity resistance due to the many hours sunk into WoW, R6, and LoL.
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