HyperBrawl Tournament
Milky Tea Studios’ HyperBrawl Tournament is a fast-paced game with a simple premise: score more goals than the other team. Sounds easy enough, but when you add in the brawling - things get chaotic fast. Only the best heroes in the galaxy have been selected to take part in the HyperBrawl Tournament and you can choose which of the twelve fighters - separated into three classes, each with their own stats and unique appearances - that you want to climb the ranks with. There’s both online and offline modes to choose from, including Arcade and Campaign for playing alone or in local multiplayer, and Blitz Mode as well as Private Matches online, giving plenty of variety, no matter how you want to play.
The campaign runs in a typical tournament fashion, with winning teams progressing on to the next stage. Take your team, made up of you and a bot (that you can switch between at will), and make your way up the ranks, winning the Galaxy League and the Cosmic Cup. Each match consists of three rounds, lasting just 90 seconds each, leaving not a lot of time to plan any tactics against your opponent, so you’ll just need to go hard or go home. It’s definitely beneficial to perfect your skills in the Trials and Advanced Trials that are available for training as this will help to improve your aim, how well you react during the on-screen frenzy, and get you used to the layout of each of the twelve stunning arenas.
Of the three classes, there are clear differences in how fast or robust certain characters are. Core characters are ones that are general all-rounders; Swift are the speedy ones, although are much weaker due to this; and Tanks are the slow, powerful ones that can take and give out a beating. Through playing the different modes, with any of the available heroes, your account level will increase, unlocking additional characters for your roster and gaining credits, the in-game currency. Objectives are also available to be completed, with the aim being to tick them all off before time runs out and new objectives become available, and doing so will reward you with credits to spend on alternate skins for each of your brawlers.
There’s not a lot of space to move around each arena, so it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming with so much happening in such close quarters. This can make things feel a little unbalanced at times, as you and your opponents can just attack each other repeatedly until one of you is KO’d, leaving the goals fairly open - and with such a short distance between goals and the ability to use your HyperCurve ability, you can pretty much shoot from anywhere. Playing online and in local multiplayer is really enjoyable, as matches are very quick and you get a real sense of satisfaction from scoring a HyperCurved goal against the enemy teams. This is where you’ll really have to know what you’re doing, as failing to utilise your special moves and HyperCurve will be your downfall.
You have two main attacks to use against your opponents: kicks and punches. The kicks are by far the superior option, as you can retain speed whilst kicking as well as do far more damage - often knocking enemies out in the process. The punches on the other hand seem to be fairly weak, and slow you right down when doing so, and this is across all hero classes. HyperBrawl is an apt title, with plenty of lightning fast wrangling going down in the arena. You have special moves that have to be built up to use, and these can be assigned when selecting your character, so it’s good to see the variety in options ranging from spinning sword attacks to a magnet to pull the ball to you.
The art style is well done, with fantastic use of colour and neon lighting to really make the arenas pop. Character models are decently designed but lack personality within the selection screen as they have quite a rigid stance - seeing a little more life in them would have been a nice inclusion. Each arena has different blockades and barriers throughout, often forcing you and the other players into a bottleneck in order to move from one side of the arena to the other. This is obviously to prompt some brawling to go down, but the small arenas combined with this can make it quite frustrating when it happens repeatedly. Having larger arenas, and allowing for an even-closer camera angle would have been good as this would retain the challenge of getting from one end of the arena to the other, without having the bottlenecking. As it is, it often just results in a panicked mashing of buttons in the hope you’ll come out with the ball. Musically, the soundtrack is very upbeat and catchy and fits perfectly in the arena setting. The narration done by the Tournament Announcer seems well done at first, but quickly becomes repetitive with the same things being called out too often. Thankfully, you are able to turn this off however in doing so, makes the game feel like its missing that key part. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I suppose.
Each character has a variety of unlockable skins that can be purchased using the in-game currency, or unlocked via Artifacts. Artifacts act like typical lootboxes, but thankfully are unlockable through the credits earned in-game, and there’s no way to purchase additional credits using real-world cash. Annoyingly, the two coolest-looking skins for each character are locked behind paid DLC content packs - the Cosmic, Warrior and Homestars Founders Packs; each containing two skins for four different characters. These packs aren’t overly expensive, but it’s really irritating to find that literally every characters best skins are paywalled (and most of the free ones are pretty bog standard).
Priced at £19.99 for the base game, and £26.74 for the Ultimate Edition (which includes all of the Founders Packs for the additional skins, as well as two Celebration packs with Goal Blazes and Ball Trails for you to equip), it’s a reasonable enough price - but it’ll never not annoy me having to pay extra for cosmetics. It’s a fun time, with plenty of content throughout the different game modes to keep you interested, and with short, sharp matches, it’s easy to squeeze in a quick game when you’ve not got a lot of spare time.
In the end, we decided to give HyperBrawl Tournament the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Have you played HyperBrawl Tournament yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Milky Tea for the HyperBrawl Tournament Xbox One review code!
