Week one is now over and i have barley been able to squeeze in the time to write a review but here it is

Brawling for a week

At first glance Brawl is just a repackaged copy of Melee, which in many respects it is, until you get past the opening cut scene where you are presented with one of the most glorious game menus you’ve ever seen; I mean straight away you can tell that this is going to be something special and you can see just how much work went into this game.

Well anyway enough about the menus and submenus. Once you get to the character select you relax and realise this may not be so different after all (which can only be a good thing, trust me). On inspecting the character range one of two things will pop into your mind: one will be “Bloody hell, that’s a lot of characters!” and the other being “Huh? I thought there would be more than that.”. Now I can understand why you would be thinking both of those things; it had a kind of double effect on me. The initial awe at the game makes you forget all the hype and press releases about the game and after a few minutes of bliss you actually realise something: they promised more. I mean I know there are unlockable characters and such but still the reviewers promised tones of characters and the developers promised hundreds but if you look at the actual character range it is an elite and prestigious award in the gaming world to be in this game (the elite bit coming to an end right were Yoshi starts... only joking I love Yoshi really).

The controls as usual are excellent although some veteran characters feel a bit messed up at first because their move sets have been tweaked. For example Link’s jump; at first trying to run around and jumping with Link feels totally wrong but you just have to get used to it and it doesn’t affect the game play overall.

The only sad thing about the controls is that to get the best use out of them you are forced to play with a Gamecube pad - don’t get me wrong I love the GC and its controllers are awesome (I own two wavebirds so am all set up for brawl), but I think it would have been nice to be able to have a new control scheme similar to the transition from the N64 version to melee. If you have a GC pad then whip it out for this one. Using the C stick will be a lot more important compared to melee where not many people knew it did anything. On brawl I find myself almost dependant on the C stick attacks and can go whole battles only using it and the analogue stick, particularly with players like Ike and Pit where their swords become almost unbeatable this way.

I have to say when I heard there would be a storyline to the single player I was a bit sceptical but luckily I was wrong to ever doubt it. It’s a great way to unlock characters and adds depth to just speed running though classic mode with every character, which got tedious before especially since you had to do it twice with each character. Now even if you don’t have friends or Wi-Fi it’s still a worthwhile purchase because it has a truly enveloping story. Shame about the absence of voice acting - all just to keep Link silent I would guess.

I have to say the whole game is awesome, but serious faces on, here comes the ‘but’... it’s awesome but for one let down: online mode. I can’t believe how slow it is! The first time I played it I was only against one other person and the frame rate was practically one frame every two seconds; I couldn’t believe it. Another thing about brawl is you can only have one person on each console so say there are three people at your house, there is absolutely no point going online simply because only one person can fight at a time and when you are fighting what’s the point when the battle is so laggy and slow? I’m pleased to report though that if you do have three friends ‘round, brawling is still brilliant. You get a trophy for brawling for 100 hours which may seem like a lot but I think even casual gamers could rack this much play time on this incredibly addictive game whether you just have a quick brawl after school or have people over for the night just to brawl the evening away.

Conclusion: go out and buy this game because your Wii is begging you. A truly flawless game (well, if you don’t have wireless internet access).