I really liked the first Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl game. It was fast and frantic and had interesting mechanics, especially for a platform fighter. I'm incredibly happy to report that Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is so much better than this game, it actually makes me realize a lot of its shortcomings.

NASB2's roster cuts may be disappointing, I personally was sad to see CatDog, Oblina and Helga go, but it makes up for it by having each character play so much more uniquely than the first game. This isn't just the same game with updated graphics and new characters, no, they completely remade the physics from the ground up. Even the veterans feel different with new mechanics like, Garfield's Sugar Rush and Reptar's fireball meter. I was a bit weary on the additions of side specials and back airs, initially preferring the Smash 64 simplicity of the first NASB, but they really do add a lot more to the hypeness of the combat and better ways to approach the opponent. Speaking of hypeness, the Slime Mechanic is the most insane thing this game adds. Not only can you cancel attacks into other ones at the cost of meter, but you can also Burst ala Guilty Gear, and power up your special moves to have better effects. Of course, if that sounds too complex, you could also do what I do, and hold off on using those in favor of a crazy super move. It can be blocked and rolled out of, unlike Smash, so being able to land these properly gets me excited every single time.

The visuals are so much better this time around, the environments and lighting are colorful, and the characters are way more expressive and are animated to represent their shows and personalities in more fitting ways, such as Danny Phantom's features being flattened out, or Ren and Stimpy's model morphing and contorting to their psychotic expressions. The music goes harder than it honestly has any right to as well, but after the team from the first game couldnt get the right sound that they wanted, it feels like this soundtrack is an overcorrection in the best way possible.
There's actually a story mode here too, a rougelike campaign complete with voice acting that makes Smash's World of Light pale in comparison. Actually, I should stop comparing this to Smash so much. Even though I have had more fun with this in a few days than years of playing Ultimate, I want there to be more room for platform fighters that don't get compared to Smash every opportunity. Of course, If we get more games like this where the devs prioritize fun and creativity, that reality could be well within reach.

Oh yeah, and fuck Multiversus. Just wanted to throw that out there.

For someone who plays platform fighters competitively, this game has everything I've wanted from the genre. The slime mechanic is very inventive and I think other games will take inspiration from it. The campaign is pretty alright (a miracle for the genre). The characters are all very well designed and everyone feels like themselves.
Right now it's still pretty buggy, and I wouldn't recommend it to casual players at the current price, but I think it's the best competitive platform fighter since Rivals of Aether.

Disclaimer: I’m no pro, but I’m also not total trash. I hover around Platinum in the ranked mode, for whatever that’s worth. Basically means I'm not an idiot, but I'm nowhere near being able to make the most of the game's mechanics. So take my opinion accordingly.

Anyway, this is likely the closest a non-Smash platformer fighter has come to being a great game since Rivals of Aether. Well, Rivals is a great game; this isn't quite there, but it's close. It’s got a lot of the same audiovisual issues that plague literally every platform fighter other than Smash, and ultimately its balance and characters doesn’t feel quite as tightly-knit as Rivals (to say nothing of the level of developer support). But things are a little dire out there for platform fighters right now. The last two big attempts at this, the first NASB and MultiVersus, were (at best) well-intentioned messes that very quickly fell apart. Smash Ultimate’s meta has gone to some rough places. Brawlhalla has found plenty of success, though I’m not convinced anyone actually likes the game. Any other would-be contenders like Rushdown Revolt and Fraymakers are having trouble getting off the ground. NASB2 is the first time in a while that one of these games has felt like it had a bit of juice, managing to feel good and successfully push some new ideas into the genre; it’s good, definitely scratching that Smash itch in the way that other games have not. Until the likely-excellent Rivals 2 releases next year, I’ll happily take this.

The first NASB fell victim to, well, a lot of things (namely self-sabotage from their own publisher). But purely from a design perspective, the big problem was that it tried to implement a few too many original ideas, most of which seemed to be just thrown in there without a larger design philosophy in place. The RPS mechanic where certain strong attack directions beat others didn’t actually introduce much strategy; cargo throws are inherently janky; blocking just felt awkward; airdashes quickly led to Rivals hitfalling with extra steps, resulting in a high-APM 0-death fight that wasn’t particularly fun for anyone. All of those options (except for the quite good teetering mechanic) have been walked back to more standardized options akin to Smash, and the game feels much better as a result. (No coincidence that some of the unique options in Rivals are also moving towards the same Smash baseline; Sakurai had a lot of this stuff figured out from the beginning, and has had a lot more time to iterate on the rest.) In the first game, it too often felt like I was fighting against the mechanics; the more standard baseline here gives me a natural baseline where I can better figure out how the rest of the game works. If you’ve played any amount of competitive Smash, regardless of which entry you play, you can hop in here and figure things out pretty easily. Everything feels like it should, with enough unique ideas that the game feels like its own thing.

This game’s big “innovation”, of course, is the slime meter, a mechanic they just borrowed from fighting games. (Which, unoriginal as it may be, it’s surprising it took someone this long to do it. I’ll certainly take it over most of the ‘original’ ideas I see from most platform fighters!) The parts of it that work feel great. Canceling attacks allows for a lot of variety in combo game and advantage state, opening the doors for creativity; meter also builds fast enough that you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted something if your attempt at improv doesn’t quite work out. The game feels well designed around using the slime-boosted special attacks for recovery, letting you out of sticky situations for a cost. (Some of the unique effects on slime specials are really neat, too; having two variations on each one feels great.) The game really encourages proper use of meter while also leaving a lot of room for experimentation; I walk away from each play session with new ideas to implement for the next time I hop on, and that’s what I ask for more than anything from a fighting game.

That said, there are two elements of the slime meter that I don’t like, both kind of lazily borrowed from fighting games. This game includes a burst mechanic akin to Guilty Gear, managed by the same slime meter as the rest of the kit. Burst works in traditional fighting games because odds are, if you can land the combo once, you can find another way to get damage that still gets you to the same result. In NASB2, burst tends to come out in critical situations that would normally lead to a character dying; you burst when the kill move comes, which can often come out of a confirm that was difficult to land and might not come across as easily, especially if the character fell out of the window for the confirm. It feels too much like a get-out-of-jail-free card, especially because it’s so much harder to bait in this game. You often can’t just pause and block the burst like in a traditional fighting game; confirms are generally more committal, especially if you’re in the air and can’t get back to where the opponent is. Slime presents so many more unique ways to get out of bad situations in this game that burst feels a little cheap, a little too easy compared to the other things you can do.

Similarly, the supers you can do with three bars of slime meter too often gets used for cheese. Like in traditional fighters, these are invincible super attacks that deal a lot of damage (and can lead to kills in this game; basically Final Smashes if they were standardized across the cast to just be cutscene moves that do the same damage and knockback). The key difference is that it’s far more difficult to confirm into them effectively, since startup is slow and there are no moves that would cancel into it without using the meter you need to actually perform the move. What results is a lot of wake-up supers or supers randomly thrown out to punish attempts at spacing a move. It also seems like whiffed supers are basically unpunishable? Lots of invincibility and you can act seemingly immediately after. When someone has three bars and the other person is at kill percent, it feels too often like the game revolves trying not to get hit by that specific option. It feels bad robbing and it feels bad getting robbed.

Doesn’t help that the supers look and sound kind of ugly. Part of the appeal of a super in any fighting game is the pure visual spectacle that goes with it, and that’s hard to convey in a mid-budget game like this. Even landing my own supers, I find I’d like to just hit the “skip cutscene” button. This is of course a problem that spreads across the whole game, but also the entire genre; Smash is to this today the only one of these things to be given a proper AAA budget, and its enormity and attention to detail makes newcomers feel like they have to play catchup and stretch to make their game a little bigger than it really should. The details suffer as a result. Animations don’t line up clearly with hitboxes, moves look like they’re done when they’re not (and vice versa), strong moves don’t have enough impact, it’s difficult to tell when you’re out of hitstun. There’s not a ton of variety in the sound effects—a lot of softballs hitting foam padding—and they generally sound limp and underwhelming. (In fairness, the sound thing is one I’ve only seen Smash excel at.) These presentational things make a noticeable impact on the gameplay; more clarity means it’s easier to intuit what’s happening on the screen, and too often I find myself saying ‘wait, what happened?’

Of course, a game based on Nickelodeon properties also comes with the added burden of appealing to casuals, which inevitably draws away the money into other ventures. The first game completely whiffed that, with a terrible arcade mode and no voice acting at launch. (And when they did add voice acting, I kinda wished they hadn’t.) This game does a much better job with the presentation, and even includes a roguelite campaign mode featuring newly-recorded dialogue from all of the characters. It’s not a great campaign, but how many fighting game single player modes are? This is a problem that plagues the entire genre, and even giants like Capcom fumbled with their well-intentioned-but-kind-of-miserable World Tour mode in Street Fighter 6. Literally the only platform fighter with good single player content is Melee. (Subspace Emissary sucked.) So I will say that I wish all of the money funneled into the campaign was instead spent on fully polishing the sound and visuals, but I understand why the money meant where it did. Though I wonder how much that actually translates into sales? Are a lot of people picking it up mainly for the single player content?

Ah, whatever, not my business. I don’t even really care about representation in the roster; I’ve only ever spent much time with two of the properties represented here, and I don’t feel particularly strongly about either one of them. (Though I get the sense that some of the weirder ‘90s output might be worth looking into.) I’m just interested in how they play. I do wish that some moves and entire characters weren’t so obviously pulled from Smash characters (Granny/Falcon, Nigel/Puff, Garfield and Tigre shines), though I understand why they do that; Smash has taken most of the good ideas for moves already (and even it’s plagiarized itself a few times now), and trying to come up with something fresh at this point often means coming up with something inferior. And ultimately they use those stolen moves as window dressing for more unique core ideas. Most characters have a hook that makes them fun or interesting to play as, and ultimately feel distinct from characters in other games. Mecha-Plankton has Terry’s Burn Knuckle, sure, but his hybrid heavy/zoner/grappler approach is a concept I haven’t seen before. Donatello has Cloud and Sephiroth’s upairs, but otherwise doesn’t zone the way a typical swordie in Smash does. Even Korra—a fairly straightforward brawler who borrows moves from Fox, Mewtwo, Ganondorf, Bayonetta, Joker, and Terry—keeps things fresh between the various elemental effects her kit provides. (She’s the character I’ve been playing the most.) There’s definitely some issues across the roster—some of the high-concept characters are underwhelming in practice, heavies are a little too annoying to fight—but those are the kind of things they can iron out in patches.

Inevitably, such patches will eventually render chunks of this review will become irrelevant. Likewise for the development of the game’s meta, although at this point I’m skeptical of any platform fighter that isn’t Smash or Rivals having a meta that lasts longer than a few months. But I do think this is the first time that a new contender has the juice to last long enough to leave an impression. Until these past few years, it was weird how no one was even trying to get a proper platform fighter going; since then, it’s been weird how hard it seems to get one to even feel like a full game. But with this and the forthcoming Rivals 2, things are looking up. Maybe we can finally get a few others to earnestly throw their hat in the ring.

As Smash clones goes this is probably the closest you will get to something like Ultimate. I can see huge potential in the slime mechanic though my monkey brain can't comprehend the nitty gritty. But even if you focus the more simple aspects of the slime meter you can still enjoy the game without feeling like you are missing out too much.


I still have to settle with a 7.
I encountered too many weird bugs and hiccups to give it anything higher.

If it just had a wee bit extra polish I could see myself pushing it to an 8.

I personally prefer Multiversus for its IP's and what that game introduced. But this is still not a bad option, not at all.

If this game was only being judged off its multiplayer content it would have a much higher rating- slime is such a good addition to the platform fighter genre and these characters are pretty well designed with some in-jokes for both smash fans and nickelodeon fans.

The singleplayer campaign is cool, I guess? Honestly I need to talk about the bugs on this game because holy hell it took me almost an hour and a half to get my controller working on this, and another twenty minutes with a bug on the menu that made all my buttons not work

I don't know why I bought this. This has got to be the stupidest purchase of the year for me. I knew I wasn't going to want to play it, yet I bought it anyways. It's totally fine, and it's definitely better than the first attempt. After 5 hours, I realized I didn't want to play it at all anymore. It's one of the better attempts at a Smash clone. Probably second only to PlayStation All Stars, so far. I think it just annoyed me immediately that everyone online was trying to emulate Melee gameplay. Seeing people wavedash around pissed me off LOL. I feel like everyone playing this game was coming directly from playing Melee and it rubbed me the wrong way. I have no desire to play any more of it. The single player portion didn't intrigue me, either.

The thing is, I don't care about almost any of these characters. That's kinda the main reason Smash is so beloved. It's also why I loved PSASBR so much. These attempts at a Smash clone have to consist of video game-centric characters, or I'm probably not going to care.

Improvement in every way when compared to its predecessor. However, to cut half of the first games roster out was a sacrifice too costly. There's no way to justify cutting half of the roster. In my eyes, brawlers are most enjoyable with massive character rosters. In fact, I'd go as far as to say its the main selling point of a game like this. While the game mechanics and animations have been refined and the offline content has been massively expanded upon, the appeal is still in the franchises and in the characters. Maybe Brawl 3 can fix this major downsight, should it ever see the light of day.

Played the campaign while I waited for any of my friends to pick this game up, and I gotta say, it was amazing. The mechanics are so amazing and the videos I've seen of pro FG players make me happy to imagine this game's future. THIS is labor of love. I've always been a fan of crossover titles, and this one is laying a lot of groundwork to be on Smash Bros Ultimate's level if they ever decide to rework the characters that got left out from the first game and implement even more Nickelodeon All Stars. (P.S., when I booted up the game, I totally thought I'd be an El Tigre main, but I grew to love Korra's moveset so much, so I stuck with her for the whole campaign)

platform fighters are very difficult to design! there's a lot of issues but the 2 root causes are the absurdly massive design space needed to create one (at least one approaching the polish of any smash entry), and the normals. every platform fighter character has the same inputs, whereas they have up attacks, down attacks, neutral attacks, etc. designing a characters moves in aesthetic and function around this core setup doesn't always work, and generally deviating from tools you'd expect a character to have only makes your character worse. for whatever reason, when people make these games there isn't a focus on system level counters to certain things, so in every platform fighter there's always a few matchups where one character is entirely ill equipped to deal with a certain thing.
i'm digressing a bit, but it's kind of frustrating that there's quite a number of these melee inspired games, games built off 2 decades of hindsight aping the least polished entry in a different franchise. it's not that it's melee inspired that's the issue, it's that there's a very high level of tunnel visioning in the design of these games that make them even more esoteric than melee and less fun casually. what would compel you to design a character like reptar, where:
he has an up b that goes up, then slams down- but when he goes up he has a super active, interpolated hitbox you can't contest, that due to the games slime system, gives him a free conversion thru a slime cancel that can even lead to a full reverse edgeguard onto you even though you were at 0
all his normals cover full hop height, and can be safe on shield
he has a move with infinite super armor on the charge, that the only system level counterplay is throwing him, but if you approach he can just let go and the move does 30% and has barely any recovery and he can just hold it forever too
he's also the heaviest character in the game, and can also be the fastest in terms of raw movement speed is you wavebounce his neutral b
this is just one character but the main conceit behind these games is to just 'let characters do things' unironically perpetuating the same problems top tiers in smash have. when you let characters just do things but don't account for how that will mesh with other characters, you get many situations that aren't fun to fight.
you don't even need a game to have many even matchups, melee has billions of issues but can still be fun to watch with its limited pool of viable characters because while initiative is finnicky and abstract, there's still a sense of iteration in player decision making. in these melee clones, characters layer 1 is the entire point, one you can't just play around. it's boring!

It pains me to see games like this come out, since I know they will be fantastic, and this one definitely is. It's probably the closest I've seen to my dream fighting game, a unification of Smash's movement and the mechanical complexity of trad fighters like Street Fighter or Guilty Gear. It's got meter, supers, fuckin' Roman Cancels, the works. The production quality is far better than the first entry, which, while good, had a permeating stench of shovelware to it. Now all it needs is a functional training mode and a combo counter (seriously, why the everloving hell do platform fighters never have combo counters in normal play, that shit is fighting game 101)

The problem is that people just seem to refuse to give a shit about non-Smash platform fighters, regardless of how much they improve upon Smash's gameplay or how strong their character lineup is. Whether that's a testament to the closemindedness of the Smash community or Smash's sheer quality is up to you, but, with what seems to be the end of the Smash series, or at least a very long hiatus that will likely never see the series return to its former glory, new platformer fighters like this, Fraymakers, and the upcoming Rivals 2 can finally break their way out into popularity.

In a lot of ways it's the best non-Smash platform fighter; I'd even go as far as saying the single player is better here than in Ultimate. Full voice-acting and heaps of content at launch really show how well the first game would've done with a little more confidence.

It does need a bit more polish, especially as the latest update at the time of writing has seemingly removed the ability for CPUs to get up from ledge hangs, but for the most part it works quite well. Just don't play on the Switch.

The star of the show here is the campaign, a roguelite story mode with a surprising amount of dialogue. Character-specific conversations are abundant and bring a ton of charm, especially if you're nostalgic for any of these toons. The roguelite elements do lack depth and the boss fights can be very anticlimactic, but I really enjoyed my time with it more than I expected.

Pick up NASB2 if you're a Nick fan or you're just looking for a good platform fighter after years of Nintendo spoiling you, it's a great time when the bugs are ironed out.