Probably the only thing more fun than a well-executed co-op experience is being able to bring more friends along for the ride. Legends of the Brawl plays out like a typical multiplayer action brawler, but with just enough quirks to warrant notice.
In this 4 player co-op, players take on the role of one of history’s “legendary heroes” in a battle to take down Grigori Rasputin. It’s a silly premise, but it works surprisingly well to tie up the narrative. No reason to waste too much time worrying about why Teddy Roosevelt and Lizzie Borden have teamed up. Rasputin’s created a device that brings nightmares to life and must be stopped, random historical figures are stepping up to take him out.
Players can select a hero and customize them by unlocking new abilities and gear over multiple play sessions. Levels will have different mission types and objectives to create new challenges and replayability. The Kickstarter page shows a lot of potential with a reasonable $65,000 funding goal.
Limited Lunacy
Still, there are a few hiccups that give me pause about the campaign. My chief complaint being that the funding is actually for a scaled down version of what the final game might become. Developer, Dark Tonic refers to this as the game’s MVP or “minimum viable product.” The initial release of Legends of the Brawl will only feature 4 playable characters and 5 environments. Considering a large part of the fun is getting to play as cartoonish representations of famous figures from history it’s disappointing that the roster will be so limited at release.
The plan, of course, is to continue to expand the game post launch. Dark Tonic plans to regularly add new heroes, skins, powers, and maps. It’s good for potential backers to keep perspective of what will actually be available, as opposed to what might be available down the line. Just in case everything doesn’t work out according to Dark Tonic’s plans.
Still, even the scaled-back MVP version of Legends of the Brawl looks pretty fun. Definitely the sort of game I’d want to jump in with a few buddies on Steam and waste an evening. Hopefully, Dark Tonic can keep the updates coming fast and furious before the novelty wears off.
I feel cautiously optimistic about this one. It legitimately looks like it could be fun.
That’s a good summation of the game, Joanna!
Our fourth character is nearly done (HP Lovecraft) and with even our current rate of development, we should have no problems having 2 more done for the MVP, for a total of 6 playable Legends.
We just don’t want to overpromise/underdeliver on anything, and we’d rather have a more limited quantity of content which is highly polished, than a larger amount of stuff that maybe isn’t so polished, or has a few bugs lurking about.
If we reduce the number of unique enemies in each zone by one, that would give us additional artist bandwidth for more playable characters, as well, so that’s probably a good discussion to have with our backers.
Thanks for the feedback!
Here’s a concept page for our HPL that we have been building the character off of (not been shared anywhere before):
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d6a1ecd4beb177b36dde9ba0b78535ad93cb8b437fc19a573ea25fb7d2cc0f71.png
Love the Lovecraft concept art.