TLDR: Unexpectedly great. Easy to pick up but difficult to master. Play again? Absolutely.

Each week we roll a random game that the Epic game store had for free at some point, and play it for 2 hours on stream to see how it fares. This week:

Speed Brawl

This is one of those games where you have no idea, going in, what it is going to be like. With an emblem for a logo reminiscent of the Megadrive era (which the whole industry seems to have nostaliga for) who’s to know which, if any, of the games conjured by this image it is going to be like?

Well, let me save you the wonder: it is like Sonic and Street Fighter at the same time. It is a fast-paced beat-em-up with elements of Smash Brothers and Dead Cells, so much so that I kept pressing the wrong buttons because I was trying to do Dead Cells things but the buttons were in a different place.

You know how in Tony Hawk Pro Skater you get the muscle memory of how to restart the run because if you don’t start off perfectly then what’s the point? It’s a time trial, so you get medals based on how fast you complete the route, and you get equipment based on the medal you earned. You can start the run with a boost if you are impatient to burst out of your starting cage with just the right timing.

So there is an element of roguelite to the game: that is to say, there is meta-progression within the game, unlocking skills as you gather fame (and fame as you complete courses), and equipping, uh, equipment that you can either win from a lootbox-like mechanic after a course, or buy from the shops that unlock as you progress to later areas.

Once again I find myself enthralled by the game’s self-deprecating wit and excellent art style. The story is introduced by means of a supreme animation whose style is also the game itself. Once again, a game that wears its aesthetic on its sleeve: not only is it artistically styled like an absurd action cartoon, but your characters love to announce their cringily-named special attacks when performing them: Venom Spike! Spin Attack!

The wit is not so much in the dialogue as in the details. And there is a lot of dialogue—but, mercifully, you can skip it all. The story is outlandish and daft: apparently in the late 1800s there was some war with moon creatures and Earth won and now there’s … stuff … that means we can all fight while going fast if we want to. But it’s not remotely important to the game, so long as you pick up the occasional tidbit of information stashed in there—that is, as long as you notice the bit of dialogue that tells you how the pole race works, you’ll be fine.

But in the details, the enjoyment is there in such examples as how the little French lady, Cassie, whose weapon of choice is a cricket bat, carries a fish in her B-style outfit (and, somehow, I managed to surf on said fish by boosting from the gate correctly). The character designs are merciless with their stereotyping: your host for the whole first area is an Irishman wearing green, including janky stovepipe hat; your host for the second arena is a Russian man who appears to be made out of stone. But there is no offensiveness to these stereotypes; they are just caricatures, really. There are the occasional funny moments in the dialogue—funny enough to laugh at—but really the style and the flow is entertaining enough.

And the flow must be where the game really shines. Absolutely the only complaint I could levy is that it takes maybe a bit too long to restart a course. Presumably this was not a target for optimisation when they wrote the engine, and it really doesn’t detract from the experience except in the opportunity cost of having an instant-restart that would feel that much more satisfying.

The speed boost you get when rocketing out of the cage feels fast, like that first time you played Sonic and you pelted around the loop-the-loops in Green Hill Zone. The animations are snappy and waste no frames. The combat is just confusing enough to become a button-masher but just clean enough for you to feel that, if it’s confusing, that’s your fault for not being good enough at the game yet. There are just enough moves to make you feel like you can do better next time, but not so many moves that you can’t easily swap between characters without forgetting how to play each time.

The character-swap gimmick is actually very clever. If you get knocked down you can tag in your other character, who will take over while your out character goes back on the bench to heal up. This character’s move set is sufficiently similar to keep the flow going without breaking step, and it really feels like the playtesters did a great job at ekeing out all the places where flow is broken, and the devs did a great job at patching over them. This is a game that could easily have been unsatisfying, dulled by excess mechanics and excessive interruptions, but instead was honed so that the speed and the brawl were the utmost priorities to the gameplay.

The meta-progression between runs is also mercifully brief. In many cases there is precious little to do except to go to the next course. And this is good—if you just beat a course, why waste 5 minutes in equipment and shops just to spend 4 minutes on the next course? The focus is on the gameplay, but there’s just enough meta-game to drive the gameplay and give you excuses to return to the courses you only got silver on and see if your new equipment will get you there faster.