Brawl Stars: Your New Favorite Game? (GAME REVIEW)

What up homies?
Today I’m going to be starting a new series
called “Your New Favorite Game?”
question mark?
The idea of this series is pretty straightforward,
I’ll be reviewing a game that isn’t on
my channel or is barely on my channel, discussing
things like the basic concepts of the game,
the drivers and motivation to continue playing,
the things I like and dislike about it, and
such and such.
After discussion of the game, I’ll give
it a final rating, placing it in a tier from
S to F, with the coveted S-tier being reserved
for the very best games, although anything
I put in B-tier or higher is something I consider
worth at the very least giving a try.
Along with my rating, I may or may not briefly
cover how I think the game could be improved
further.
Finally, I’ll end the video with some raw
gameplay, so you can see what it’s like
for yourself.
I’ll be providing timestamps in the description
for anyone who wants to skip to certain sections
of the video.
Now that I’ve provided you with my agenda,
let’s get into it!
To kick off the new series, today we’re
going to look at Brawl Stars.
Brawl Stars is a new smash

hit by Supercell,
the same company that created a whole plethora
of globally renowned mobile games including
Clash of Clans, Farmville, and Clash Royale.
In their newest addition to the mobile game
universe, players compete in a variety of
matchups with diverse goals and win conditions.
These minigames, referred to in Brawl Stars
as events, include things like Gem Grab, where
teams of 3 fight to collect 10 gems that periodically
pop out of a mine in the center of the map,
Heist, where the teams fight to destroy the
enemy safe on the other end of the map, and
my personal favorite, Showdown, which is basically
like a short and sweet battle royale.
Before entering any event, players must choose
which brawler they want to play as.
There are over 50 unique brawlers in the game,
each with their own health, damage, attack,
Super ability, and even with variations in
movement speed.
I’m not sure, but sometimes it also seems
like brawlers might have differently sized
hitboxes.
While I was planning this video I unlocked
my new favorite brawler, a punk rock girl
named Bibi with a baseball bat and an attitude.
Her main attack is a swing of the baseball
bat, and when her attack bar is charged up
she swings hard enough to send enemies flying.
Her Super is to blow a huge bubble of bubblegum
and hit it at people with her bat, it’s
awesome.
Brawlers can be leveled up to gain health
and damage, and at certain power levels they
also unlock modifiers to their existing toolkit.
For example, Brock is a guy with a rocket
launcher who can unlock the ability to jump
over walls, presumably by shooting his launcher
into the ground, when he gets to a high enough
level.
As far as I can tell, a new brawler is released
as a season reward every season but only as
a premium reward, and once the season ends
that brawler can be acquired through brawl
boxes, which I’ll talk about in the Progression
section of this video.
On top of seasonal new brawlers, Supercell
sometimes bedazzles the world by just revealing
a new brawler out of nowhere.
Just like in Clash of Clans and Clash Royale,
players can progressively reach higher ranks
in the game via earning trophies by winning
matches.
However, what sets this game apart from those
ones is that although you possess a total
trophy count, it’s actually the cumulative
trophies of each individual brawler you have
unlocked.
In other words, each brawler in your collection
has their own trophy count, and when you enter
a match, you’re paired with teammates and
opponents based on the number of trophies
your selected brawler has, not your total
trophies.
As a result, it’s usually really easy to
surge up in trophies when you unlock new characters,
because they start with 0.
For me, it usually seems to be at around 170
trophies that I start to feel some resistance
making it harder to climb with a given brawler,
although if I level them up or if they happen
to fit my playstyle this threshold will of
course be higher.
As you gain trophies, you continue to unlock
new rewards.
For example, at 4000 trophies you unlock a
character named Tick, which is a robot that
fires little landmines and can actually fire
over the tops of walls.
You can also unlock Brawl Boxes as you progress,
which are basically like loot drops.
These contain gold, power points to level
up your characters, and sometimes you get
lucky and they drop a new brawler.
Just like in the Clash games, there’s a
premium currency called gems that you can
sometimes acquire as well to buy pretty much
anything in the game, but I don’t think
gems drop in the brawl boxes, although I feel
like maybe they used to.
Other than trophies, you can also collect
brawl tokens by winning matches.
Brawl tokens are essentially just points that
go towards this game’s season rewards track.
Oh, you also gain experience points at the
end of matches, which of course levels up
your account.
From what I can tell, there are a few reasons
that someone might feel motivated to put time
into this game.
The first and most obvious is to gain trophies
and climb your way to the top of the world.
A player may find themselves motivated in
this way in terms of total trophies or for
specific brawlers, if not both.
The second, and this is by far the biggest
motivation for me, is to unlock all of the
brawlers.
This one is big to me because I love getting
a new character, playing around as them and
learning their strengths and weaknesses, and
showing off the new brawlers to my friends
and brothers that also play the game.
I also just want to collect them all like
Ash Ketchum.
A variation on this motivator could also be
to collect other in-game things such as skins
or brawler mods.
The third motivator that comes to mind is
to gain experience points and level up your
account, although frankly I doubt this is
something that many people care about, especially
because the only real benefit I can see from
leveling up is that it gives you brawl tokens
towards season rewards.
There is a fourth motivator that I didn’t
even know existed until I hit 4500 trophies,
but I don’t want to spoil it for you viewers
that don’t already know what I’m referring
to.
Suffice it to say, at 4500 trophies you unlock
a new section of the game.
This game has some qualities that really allow
it to stand out from the pack, to shine bright
like a star.
The first strength I would attribute to this
game is that it’s REALLY easy to pick up
and play.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it
takes like 2 or 3 minutes to learn how to
play this game.
The second strength is something we can also
see in Clash Royale, and that’s gonna be
ease of social connection.
It’s just as easy to connect to friends
in Brawl Stars, with features like Facebook
integration, friend links, and a spot to add
friends by their profile IDs.
There’s also a feature that allows you to
send friend requests to people you have recently
played with for in case you want to team up
in the future.
These first two strengths compound nicely
because it means you can download the game
and hop into matches with your buddies in
just minutes, and because private rooms are
now in the game, you can actually practice
together or against each other as well.
Another strength of this game that I’ve
touched on a bit already by now is that there
are lots of potential motivators to make progressing
through the game a more gratifying experience.
I love the thrill of unlocking and playing
with a new character, and other people may
find themselves loving to push up their trophies.
The diverse selection of game modes is also
a big plus in this game.
Between Gem Grab, Heist, Hot Zone, Showdown,
Siege, oh my gosh I just thought of all of
those in alphabetical order… wacky bro.
Anyways, there are lots of modes to keep the
game fresh and exciting, and between the diverse
modes and the diverse brawlers, you’re probably
gonna find yourself developing playstyles
and preferences in no time.
Another huge perk of this game is that it’s
active and constantly being improved by Supercell.
They’re always adding new brawlers, they
have new events opening up all the time, and
there’s even an option to make your own
maps and put them into the community for testing
and voting on.
Finally, I’d list the firing style as a
strength.
This game allows you to autofire, such that
your brawler will automatically attempt to
hit the nearest target whenever you tap on
the screen, but it also allows you to drag
to fire instead, meaning you have the option
to aim into bushes or ahead of moving targets.
Moving on to weaknesses!
There is one big weakness that super bothers
me when I play this game, but it’s gonna
be the last weakness I talk about.
Before that though, one minor weakness found
in this game is that some of the modes have
some overlap.
For example, the Hot Zone events pit teams
of 3 against each other to control one or
two circles on the map, and the first team
to occupy each circle for a certain period
of time wins the game.
Gem Grab is a totally different event where
teams compete for control of the gem mine
which spits out the gems they need to hold
to win.
They’re different, but really they’re
similar because both require you to control
a hot point to win.
Another example is the Knockout and Bounty
events, which are basically both team deathmatch
modes except in knockout you get eliminated
from the round and in Bounty there’s a timer
to end the game instead.
Another weakness of this game is that the
grind can feel like just that, a grind.
Sometimes it feels like that next trophy reward
is never gonna be reached, because it’s
just so slow-going occasionally.
This can make it hard to play the game for
long periods of time, but on the upside it
usually feels like lots of fun again after
you give the game a break for a little while.
The third weakness I’d attribute to this
game is that it just feels a little too difficult
to collect coins and gems.
Coins are spent to buy things like mods and
power points from the shop, and are also spent
to upgrade brawlers when they have enough
power points.
Gems are the premium currency of the game,
except unlike other Supercell games, getting
gems takes FOREVER in Brawl Stars.
The final, most irritating weakness for me
is something of a personal gripe.
So, for some context, I actually used to play
this game waaaaay back in Beta before it was
even available in the United States.
I literally had to pretend I lived in Canada
to get into the Beta back in 2017.
At that time, the game had a different firing
system.
There was no autofire, and instead of dragging
to aim, you tapped a location and your brawler
would fire at the location you tapped.
My favorite hero back then was Barley, a robot
that basically throws bottles of poison or
fire or what have you, and he can throw them
over walls.
They deal damage in a small area and make
that area caustic for one second, meaning
someone who stands there will take damage
once on impact and once more if they stand
in or enter the puddle, which then dissipates.
Now let me tell you: tap firing was SO MUCH
BETTER for heroes that throw, because they
not only have to choose a direction to attack,
they also have to choose a distance.
When Supercell switched the game over to autofire
and drag to aim, they made it so that whenever
you tap to fire, it just autofires.
Therefore, no matter where you tap, your brawler
will attack the same spot because it registers
your tap as an autofire.
This means you can’t tap aim your shots.
When they implemented this change, they had
to buff heroes like Barley and Dynamike a
TON to compensate for the change, but really
what they should have done is made a feature
where players can turn off autofire in the
settings.
As it stands, you have to drag each shot out
from your brawler to the exact location you
want them to throw their attack to, which
makes aiming with them a million times harder
while heroes with linear fire remain completely
unaffected because they don’t need to account
for distance.
To be honest though, I don’t think this
will really bother anyone that didn’t get
to experience the game in beta, so if you’ve
never played this I wouldn’t even worry
about it.
After weighing out all of the strengths and
weaknesses, I think Brawl Stars went from
solid S-tier to the middle of B-tier for me
when they changed the firing system, but for
anyone that hasn’t gotten to try the old
style, it deserves a rating of A-tier.
Currently I think this game sits at around
the middle of A-tier, but there are a couple
of things that come to mind that could elevate
this game straight into S-tier.
First and foremost, adding in some sort of
campaign or levels would instantly bring this
game to a whole new level in three ways: first,
by giving players a new motivator, i.e. beating
all of the levels, second, by incorporating
a storyline into the game which will ultimately
cause some players to develop a sense of sentimental
or nostalgic value in the game, and third,
by giving players a new way to unlock more
rewards.
One idea that comes to mind is to have a special
brawler that can only be unlocked by completing
the whole campaign, or if there will be more
levels added to the campaign then maybe there
could be a brawler per season or something.
Another possibility here could be to reward
gems for beating certain levels, like maybe
even boss levels.
The second huge improvement to the game that
I can’t even imagine would take much coding
is to just add in the option to toggle firing
modes.
Like seriously, just add it in bruh.
There are also some minor changes that could
bring the game to the higher end of A-tier,
such as making it a little easier to gain
gems and maybe allowing players to unlock
brawlers with currency other than gems sometimes.
Oh, I actually forgot to mention this, but
there’s a third currency called star points
that can be used mostly to get new skins but
sometimes can be used to buy brawl boxes as
well.
Alright homies, that’s about as detailed
of a breakdown as I’m able to give on this
game without vicariously overplaying it for
you, but now that we’ve discussed the overview,
progression, motivation, strengths, weaknesses,
AND rating, it’s time for some straight
gameplay.
Go ahead and write me a comment telling me
whether you’re gonna try this game, and
if you want to add me as a friend, my player
ID is right in the description!
Ok homies, that about wraps up my game review
of Brawl Stars!
Thanks for watching, and let me know if you
like this series enough to see me cover more
games in the future.
Alternatively, let me know you hate it and
never want to be exposed to such terror again!
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next
week.

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