Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 Review (MSH Studios)
I'm no expert in platform fightings, NASB 1 was literally my first and only one before this one. I enjoyed it, so decided to give it's sequel a shot when it was on sale.
At first, everything seems great. More voicelines, better music, improved stages (except Tommy's playground, I miss it), more mechanics for characters, and most importantly - Campaign mode with bosses. But then you run into some issues...
1. Technical stuff. Easily the worst part of NASB 2 is it's big poll of bugs and weird limitations. Characters can sometimes ignore inputs, especially during platforming in Campaign. You always have to start the Campaign with default key settings and only switch them when you save Patrick and lose after. The main menu sometimes gets laggy and doesn't allow you to switch to extras. You can sometimes get stuck in textures. No cloud saves means you will lose all your progress if removing the game from your device. However, the one that bugs me the most - Arcade mode is literally unplayable. Some people say that it only works fine if your OS is set to English, which is wild. And from what I understand, there have been much more bugs before - weird hitboxes, inability to swich the keys and so on. And I'm only talking about offline - afraid to even imagine what people face playing with each other.
2. Character selection. Not a big deal, but something that bugs me a bit. This game is a crossover, so it's appeal is having more franchises smashed up together. In comparison with NASB 1, we got 2 new ones with El Tigre and the Beavers, but lost 2 with Oblina and Catdog. And the main sinner of the story is Season Pass. The main appeal of NASB 1's Brawler pack was Jenny the fact that they were mostly brand new IP's - out of 5 post-launch additions 4 represent new franchises. Here, all four belong to already the most represented ones. Do we really need 5 SpongeBob or Avatar characters? Have to be fair, I would better see Plankton and Azula as bosses, especially considering there's a very small amount of those.
In the end...I don't regret getting the game on sale, but I cannot recommend it, especially at full price, which is a bretty big one. The Campaign is still really fun (when you finally get to play with your settings), but the tech stuff is just frustrating. Maybe those will be fixed some day, can't say. But right now, sadly, no.