A handful of games have tried to take a bite of Smash Bros’ slice of the fighting game pie. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, released in 2021, was one of the more successful – although criticism seemed to focus on its high price and relative paucity of characters and stages.
Does that make it a good or a bad thing that Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is in development, then? It’ll feature new stages and new characters, while revamping the look and layouts from the original. Among the new characters is Spongebob’s perma-frustrated neighbour Squidward, who you can see in the announcement trailer below.
NASB2 will also include a singleplayer campaign about taking down Vlad Plasmius, the bad guy from Danny Phantom, and new extra-powerful movies called Supers. Details are otherwise thin on the ground at this stage. There are a couple of before-and-after comparisons in the trailer above that show the revised art, however, and the characters do look better to my eye. April O’Neil now looks like she has bones, for example. I’m less clear on why a colourful level that was pink is now grey and brown.
If you’re not familiar, All-Star Brawl is a fighting game starring characters from various cartoons that were produced or aired on Nickelodeon, including Leonardo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life, Helga from Hey! Arnold, and Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It stays relatively close to the Smash Bros formula by also having stages that consist of various platforms, and characters can be knocked off and into the void.
Alas, while NASB fared better than some of its fellow crossover brawlers, it still didn’t find much of an audience on PC according to Steam Charts. That it cost £40/$50 at launch probably didn’t help, if reviews on Steam are a judge. So, good news, there’s more NASB stuff coming; bad news, it’s a different game, you’ll probably have to buy it again.
