Barbarian Brawl Review

What do you get if you take a village in an unknown and as yet unnamed land (the developers would like some ideas), turn it into an arena, fill it full of traps, and unleash a mob of drunken semi-psychotic barbarians? Barbarian Brawl.

The game itself has free-for-all and team deathmatch modes and has a nice zany style to it. Team deathmatch is centered on ham based warfare, whoever gets the most ham wins. Free-for-all is what it says on the tin. Hack, slash, murder, mayhem etc. What more need I say about the concept here? 20 players, in an arena, hacking and slashing away no doubt giggling to themselves as they watch their opponents explode in a cloud of crimson gore. The tone of this game is pretty successfully set by the description of the basic weapon you get “Club: The first rule of the fight club is… you hit them with it.”

The comic-like visual style shows off the amusing gore caused by thwacking people with clubs, axes and the like quite nicely, and the controls are simple enough. Run up, hit someone, block the occasional blow, push people and hope not to die.

Each kill gets you a ham, ham is the currency used to buy new toys to stick people with and in combination with other unlocks, can get you access to other barbarians as which to play.

The two downsides I have found to this game so far are thus:

1. I seem to be the only European player, which is an arse with an online arena game. At least there are bots.
2. The bots are buggy as all hell. Stuck in trees, stood there doing nothing, or charging for you in a straight line into traps.

I have no idea how populated the US servers are, you choose your region as you start the game and I didn’t really want to log on to servers at 7am their time and find a ghost town.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my position as the all time 78th worst player in Europe, 21st worst this past week, and number 1 today.

The developers appear to be regularly found in the game, smacking people about, getting a scythe to the head, and having a great old time. I hope this game doesn’t sink into obscurity as so many other indie developer gems have done. The lack of players is all that is wrong here, hopefully word of mouth will fix it.