Brawl Stars

Brawl Stars
Supercell game at its finest.
Genre(s): Battle Arena Class-based MOBA Top-down Shooter Platform(s): Android iOS Release Date: Open beta June 14, 2017 Worldwide December 12, 2018 Developer(s): Supercell Publisher(s): Supercell Country: Finland

Brawl Stars is a multiplayer online battle arena and third-person hero shooter video game developed and published by the Finnish video game company Supercell. The game was released worldwide on December 12, 2018, on iOS and Android platforms. The game features a variety of game modes, each with a distinctive objective. Players are able to choose from a selection of 'Brawlers', i.e., characters able to be controlled with on-screen joysticks inside of an in-game match.

Development and release

Supercell set out to develop a team based game similar to League of Legends and Overwatch. The team wanted to create such a game that was designed with mobile devices in mind first. According to Frank Keienburg, Game Lead of Supercell, "Our focus was on retaining a lot of depth while stripping away all the fluff." Although the game contains some elements of the battle royale genre, these were implemented before the genre as a whole took off and the team did not set out to make a game with those elements.

The game is notable for its long soft launch period during which virtually every aspect of the game changed. Supercell officially announced the game via a livestream video on June 14, 2017. It received an iOS soft launch in Canada the following day. The soft launch would last a total of 522 days, during which internally it was doubted whether or not the game would ever actually see a general release. Initially, the game was played in portrait mode and the movement controls were controlled by tapping on the screen. Eventually, landscape mode and joysticks were implemented. Other changes include changing the UI, changing the metagame and transitioning the game from 2D to 3D. Frank Keienburg attributes the difficult beta period to the developers working in a new genre where they "weren't sure how to interpret its success." The game soft-launched in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia for iOS on January 19, 2018. On June 26, 2018, Android received early access to the game as a continuation of the soft launch.

Brawl Stars was made globally and officially available on December 12, 2018. It made more than US$63 million in its first month. On June 9, 2020, Brawl Stars was released in mainland China, with the corresponding changes to accommodate to the Chinese laws.

Partnerships

The game has a partnership with Line Friends to create official merchandise, new skins for Brawlers that are based on Line Friends characters, sticker packs on Line Messenger, and new content. A pop-up store was opened in January 2020 in South Korea to sell the merchandise from the partnership. Merchandise is also available at major Line Friends retail stores and online. In September 2022, Brawl Stars also partnered with BT21, featuring new skins and Pins in-game.

The game partnered up with Paris Saint-Germain F.C. (PSG), a French professional soccer club, in 2019 to host Brawl Stars Ball Cup organized by PSG's esports division. There were three online qualifier events and an online playoff event. The top two teams travelled to Paris for the finals. The finals were played live at PSG's home stadium, Parc des Princes. All matches took place in Brawl Ball, a football-like game mode.

The game partnered up with PSG again in 2020 and 2021. During the partnerships, the game launched the Paris Saint-Germain Challenge. The challenges are similar to the championship challenges, but all matches are based in the Brawl Ball game mode. In 2020, the game offered a PSG skin for Shelly for players who won nine matches and lost four or fewer times. PSG's esports division also has a team that competed in the 2020 championship challenge. In 2021, the game offered a PSG Mike skin for Dynamike.

The game partnered up with Godzilla in 2024 to create official merchandise, new skins and pins for Brawlers based on various kaiju, and a new game mode named City Smash.

Gameplay

Players partake in battles with a collection of characters called 'Brawlers', each with a unique set of attributes; primary weapon and charged Super attack (both exclusive to the Brawler), stats (HP/Ammo), Star Powers and Gadgets (passive and active abilities, exclusive to the Brawler), and Gears (stat perks shared between Brawlers with specific play styles).

Brawlers are organized in seven different rarities in a hierarchy type of most common to rarest, all represented with their own color:

• Trophy Road (white) Brawlers are unlocked by advancing in the game's primary progression system, the latter Trophy Road;
• Rare (lime), Super Rare (blue), Epic (purple), Mythic (red) and Legendary (yellow) Brawlers are categorized by their decreasing drop chance (Rare being the easiest to find, Legendary being the hardest) in loot boxes acquired when playing or simply purchased in the shop with Gems (the game's premium currency), or Star Points (a special currency that's only obtained by playing). These can also be purchased individually at a notedly higher price;
• and Chromatic (mix of purple, red and yellow) Brawlers are of a special category that decreases their unlock rarity with each new Brawl Pass season (the game's Season Pass system), starting as Legendary, then transitioning to Mythic and finally Epic, staying that way forever. When first introduced, Chromatics can only be unlocked in their respective Brawl Pass until their season ends, when they are integrated to boxes' drop-pool next to Brawlers of normal rarities.

Players battle in solitary, duos or can form teams of three to play against. All game modes (solo, duo, 3v3) have their own objectives, rules, match conditions and arena battlegrounds (called 'Maps'). Some examples include 'Gem Grab', the primary 3v3 mode in which players compete to possess gems that generate from the map gradually, and 'Showdown', a battle royale mode played individually ("Solo") or in teams of two ("Duo"), where the winners are those that position in the highest placement possible by eliminating their opponents.

Why It's A Star

1. The gameplay is really fun and challenging, even for this type of game, since there's a lot of game modes that are fun to play and have challenging difficulty too.
   • A lot of the unbalanced brawlers are extremely fun to play, such as Bull, Dynamike, Leon and even Colt, since they deal a lot of damage and some of them are really fast too, some are so broken that they even are at the S tier on the tier list of the game.
2. The animated trailers are very good and also fun to watch, since they have amazing animation and art style, and some have great voice acting that sound like the respective characters, however there weren't any official dubs as of now.
   • They also are so great that they might make you want to play this game or even wanting to watch all of the video animations of the franchise, they also do advertise the game really well.
   • Some of them even show the respectives personality of the characters in question, such as Colt and Shelly in the trailer "No Time to Explain", or Polly in the trailer "Piper's Sugar and Spice!".
3. As seen in the Brawl Talks, which are the videos addressing the content that's to come to the game in future updates, the development team listens to feedback frequently and does their best to make changes that will improve the game and be liked by the majority of the user base, even if it requires re-making old, but iconic mechanics entirely.
   • An example are the gears which have been re-designed from scratch to match each brawler's play style in the style of star powers and gadgets instead of being shared universally by every brawler in the game regardless of how much it affects or synergizes with their play style.
   • Another example that should be noted is the new Power League, which finally has better communication methods with the team before the match starts like suggesting what brawlers to ban directly or requesting to swap brawlers by showing your stats with said brawler.
4. All of the brawlers have great and memorable character design, such as Leon, El Primo, Shelly, Colt, Bull, Jessie, Poco and Brock, just to name a few.
   • They also stand out since they look different from each others, especially with their appearance.
5. Tight and responsive controls, which will not feel unresponsive for a second, and the controls are really easy to learn too, they also are an improvement over another Supercell game, Clash Royale (even if that game had good controls), but however they can be slippery with some brawlers, but to a slight extent.
6. The characters had a lot of memorable catchphrases, such as El Primo famous "El Primo!" or even his "For pain and for glory" phrase that became a meme over the years.
7. Lot of events (or game modes) is featured in the game, some of them were also exclusive to a season. There are many really good and fun game modes, such as:
   • Basket Brawl
   • Big Game
   • Boss Fight
   • Bot Drop
   • Bounty
   • Brawl Ball
   • Brawl Stars Championship
   • Challenges
   • Club Games
   • Duels
   • Duo Showdown
   • Showdown
   • Gem Grab
8. The roster is great and better as the updates progress, since there are over 82 characters to choose from, the roster back then was just decent, however.
9. Really great soundtrack that is of very high quality for a mobile game, since the soundtrack is really catchy and had memorable musics, such as the memorable menu theme.
10. All of the events also had great logo design, and also stand out, thank to their stylish design.
11. For most new seasons of the game, they always add new brawlers to the roster, which could make the game even more complete and having an even bigger and better roster than before, especially compared to the first version in 2018.
12. Awesome voice acting for all of the characters since they all sound fitting for them and the voice of the characters stand out too.
13. While there are still microtransations, there are less of them now than before, and this is due to the fact that Supercell try to make the game even better, as stated for the Brawl Talk pointer.

Bad Qualities

1. To address the biggest negative points, Brawl Stars is a brief example of Supercell's flawed universal practices and inevitable pay-to-win game design. Formula that has sadly persisted since their pioneer creations such as Clash of Clans. Brawl Stars has a notably exhaustive progression system that usually anti-synergizes with the rest of its features as explained below.
2. The character upgrades system is flawed. Class-based shooters rarely work with character upgrades so that's why they generally distance themselves from this mechanic (Team Fortress 2, Apex Legends, Overwatch, etc.) so it's no clue Brawl Stars would fail at experimenting with this combination of incompatible resources.
   • Brawlers have 11 Power Levels, each upgrade being of course more expensive than the last in terms of Power Points (the points you collect for each Brawler individually) and Gold (an additional fee to upgrade them once a Brawler is maxed out on Power Points for the next upgrade) spent.
   • A common mistake is how they offer very few incentives to upgrade the characters. Brawler Power Levels 1-6 and 8 are nothing, but stat upgrades (health and damage), while Levels 7 and 9-11 are the only real enhancements, guaranteeing access to Gadgets in P.L.7, Star Powers in P.L.9 and Gears in P.L. 10 and 11.
3. Special moments of playing in general like Double Token Weekend didn't apply to every weekend, not helping that they are often slow to get, and getting Star Powers with tokens will cost you 2000 Gold Coins.
4. The 2021 Gear update is often seen as Brawl Stars' worst update of all time. First off, a Gears mechanic (upgradable passive perks that compliment your playstyle) not only sounds grindy, unnecessary, generic and free-to-play unfriendly for Brawl Stars' standards, but the execution was unacceptable with every letter, forcing you to level up your Brawlers to the newly added Power Levels 10 and 11 if you want to unlock and upgrade Gears.
   • Even after the heavy grind, you still have to do those individually for each Brawler despite all five Gears being the same for all of them. This is something that all free-to-plays have deemed as needlessly time-consuming and only favorable to whales and maxed out players
5. There are some issues with RNG, as expressed with the players' spawn points in most game modes and the Showdown game mode, where you will mostly rely on RNG for victory, often causing an unlucky loss that wasn't even the player's fault to begin with:
   • For players' spawn points, many Maps rely strongly on the architecture for many strategies to work or to give your team good chances of winning. Each spawn point can benefit a brawler in unintended ways while lowering another's usefulness
   • For Showdown, there are these special items called "Power Cubes" that boost a player's Health and Damage by 10% each. Cubes are obtained from Crates that are scattered around the map randomly, each dropping one cube. Instead of having the player that destroyed the Crate (or whoever harmed it last if the toxic gas destroyed it) instantly absorbe the cube, it drops anywhere near the Crate's radius which makes no sense at all.
     • A slightly better alternative would involve the cube dropping in the exact location where the Crate spawned, yet that's not the case here. An example of this is when two players are fighting over a Crate and they destroy it, whoever stood nearer to the location where the cube dropped gets a higher chance of getting it, while the player that was centimeters away rises their chances of losing the game.
6. While most of the brawlers are great, some are somewhat flawed or even downright terrible, this include but not limited to:
   • Back then, Frank suffered from being way too slow to the point of being almost unplayable, and he could been easily killed, but howewer now he is a great brawler that is faster.
   • Mortis suffer from poor hit-detection and sometime his attacks can be blocked on a wall, which can be annoying.
   • Edgar, while not a bad brawler, he can be extremely annoying to deal with, and is almost no-skilled since you just had to be right in front of someone and killing him/her, but Howewer some brawlers such as Fang or Leon can easily get rid of him when he jump.
     • To play as, he is decent but somewhat suffer from poor hit-detection, though not as bad as Mortis.
   • Fang is way too overpowered as he deal a lot of damages and his specials can easily kill you too, additionnaly, he is really fast, so you will had a hard time to fight him, but he is still a great brawler though.
   • Buzz and Kit are extremely overpowered and can be very easy to grind trophies with. This could be because of their high amount of damage, and the Showdown mode cranks that up to 11, the more power cubes you have, the move overpowered they become.
7. Although it is advertised as a Ranked Competitive-type game mode, "Power League" suffers from luck-based characteristics, as well as some not so skill-based mechanics, destroying the purpose of said game mode solely depending on the player's skill level:
   • One of, if not the worst downside of playing Power League with randoms means you'll have no clue of your teammates' game progression. While it doesn't sound that bad at first, it becomes unbearable when knowing that each player is allowed to use brawlers of any Power Level. Unlike challenges where the game lets you play with all your brawlers maxed out regardless of the separate power levels that you have for each of them, therefore giving fair chances of victory to all participants, in Power League the power levels stay the same for everyone. This gives an unbelievably unfair advantage to players with better progression as they not only get access to the Star Powers, Gadgets and Gears, but they also get a significant rise of HP and damage.
     • A very common scenario has trolls selecting Power Level 1 Brawlers to bring a disadvantage to their team, this has been documented countless times, yet the developers never showed interest in fixing this issue that involves both inputs from the developer and community.
   • When starting a game of Power League after the random map has been chosen, the two teams take turns to select their brawlers and the team leader bans a specific brawler from the match. A coin drop decides which team gets to choose the first brawler, but since there can't be duplicates regardless of the duplicate brawler being chosen by one member of both teams, this offers a cosmic advantage to the team that gets to pick brawlers first. It doesn't help how the next turn allows the other team to choose two brawlers in a row.
     • An aggravating characteristic that derives from this is the fact that playing as the selected team's leader makes you the last to choose a brawler, and by the time the other players get their turn all the reasonable brawlers are already occupied which leaves you with the weaker and questionable brawler choices instead.
   • An issue mentioned by BQ#11, random spawn points for each player prevail in Power League, which is another feature that benefits a specific team in unintentional ways.
   • During the first phase of Power League (choosing brawlers and abilities), there is almost no real feedback and communication between teammates. One can't suggest what brawler the leader should ban, nor recommend a brawler or abilities to select, which just worsens the flaw from BQ#12.1.
     • The closest action to actual teammate cooperation when choosing brawlers involves tapping certain brawlers' icons over and over to let teammates know what your possible choices are, but even that technique can get ignored pretty easily by your teammates, and in very few occasions it will actually be efficient.
8. Acknowledging all the problems that Power League dragged in, the developers made the shameless move to copy the exact system with no changes whatsoever to the Power Matches from the anticipated Club Leagues update, with the only difference that there is a limit of daily matches one can play depending on how many tickets they have.
   • Extending from this, the first weeks of Club League featured a mechanic that allowed playing more daily matches than usual. When you'd run out of daily tickets, you were allowed to buy Golden Tickets (a replacement for the exhausted tickets) and play a bit more daily matches. This has led to most Club Leagues being won by the Clubs that bought more Golden Tickets and lost their games rather than the Clubs that won. Not even the club party bonuses (extra points awarded by playing with Club members) were enough to even the advantage of using Golden Tickets.
9. The earlier versions had poor characters models that either look creepy (El Primo) or downright awful (Shelly), but however the newer updates had better graphics that look amazing.

Reception

Brawl Star received mixed to positive reviews by critics and gamers, but the reception is also pretty divise, with some considering this game to be good, and other that consider it to be a flawed or outright bad game.

It had a score of 72/100 on Metacritic.

Trivia

• Few Brawlers, like Jacky or Berry (in "It's a Berry Day!" trailer), attempt to swear with motivation, only for the imprecation to be cut off with a censor sound. However, the Brawler Chuck temporarily had an exclusive line in one of his skin when he says "Sti ca##i, mi è entrata della sabbia negli occhi!", which directly translates in "Oh f##k, sand got into my eyes!". It was utterly cut after the release.
• In Beta, Mortis had a hat originally. However, when it actually global released, Mortis had no hat. People who played from beta went against the decision. So, Supercell decided to add the hat to Mortis. That led to Top Hat Mortis which is a free skin if you unlock Mortis.
• Trophies were limited to 8000 once.
• The background of Brawl Stars was going to be a space game. Then to a western side game, but that changed to now which is very unpredictable. There are a lot of custom to the maps. There are Normal sand, grass types, Retropolis, beach, and Tara's Bazzar based themes. So, the background is "Brawltopia" based on Supercell, (Brawl Talk).
• Now, Poco has different star power than before. They are Da Capo, and Screeching Solo. When Poco's star power released, the ability was to heal his teammates when he dies. However, that led to discussion, and some glitch. In brawl ball, everyone dies when either team had scored once. Poco's star power healed his teammates and they sometimes were still alive.
• Only 2 legitimate players have gotten lvl 500, the max level in the game. Since levels are gone, they will pretty much remain the only players to have gotten it.
• Brawl Stars was seconds away from getting killed in beta (Frank Supercell was the one who saved it IIRC, I think this was before he got lead dev).
• The catalogue has the same order as the characters.csv file, that's why you will see Tick and Gene ordered before Leon, since both were unfinished brawlers in beta that existed in the files.
• 8-Bit's attack and super existed in beta.
• BoneThrower, a brawler concept that existed in the files in beta, where their mechanic is supposedly having a pet that follows their attack, but it never saw the light of day and they were even removed from characters.csv.
• Homer (not to be confused with Homer Simpson), another brawler concept that existed in the files around late 2019-early 2020, but they were butchered into Gene and Piper's gadgets.
• The angry pin of animal-related brawlers (Bo, Nita, Ruffs, etc) usually have the smoke coming out of their nose instead of their head. There is a slight chance this infers Bo and Nita's headpieces are living/sentient.
• Halo gadgets (Rico's 2nd gadget, Belle's 2nd gadget, ones that put a halo above your head and change your attack) last for 83.33 minutes.
• Buzz's circle lasts for 10 minutes. You could actually test this in training cave or Boss Fight, unlike halo gadgets (13m 14s limit, you know).
• Fang has the tank hitbox while Buster has the normal hitbox.
• In 2019, the game collaborated with the reality series Big Brother Brasil to produce an episode related to the game itself. This was probably done to promote the game, as the game was new at the time the episode was filmed. It was confirmed to be lost media, until July 10, 2024, where a link to the full segment was posted to YouTube. You can watch it here.

Videos

Load video

YouTube

YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy

ContinueDismiss

Load video

YouTube

YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy

ContinueDismiss

Comments

Loading comments...