Recent reviews by Retsu Unohana

I downloaded this game thinking I was about to have some casual fun. A friendly little platform fighter. Something light to relax with after a long day. Instead, what I downloaded was a decade-long psychological endurance test disguised as a free-to-play video game.

It started on mobile.

Yes. Mobile.

There I was, thumbs on glass, thinking I was actually good. Winning matches. Hitting combos. Beating people semi-consistently. I thought I understood Brawlhalla. I thought I had potential. I thought I was built different.

Then I made the mistake of switching to PC.

I downloaded it on Steam, fired it up, connected a keyboard, looked at the clean 144 FPS animations, and thought, “This is it. This is where I ascend.”

Instead, this is where my delusion was surgically removed.

The game felt fine. Controls made sense. I won a few matches. I felt hope again.

That was my second and most dangerous mistake.

Then I queued ranked.

Every match is the same cycle. Queue up confident. See the loading screen. Opponent plays Scythe. Your heart rate hits critical mass. The countdown starts. Three. Two. One. Suddenly you are no longer playing the game. You are being juggled in the air like a wet laundry bag while your opponent performs a perfectly choreographed, five-minute-long combo they have clearly practiced since birth.

You touch the ground for exactly 0.3 seconds before being launched into the stratosphere again. You burn dodge. You burn jump. You burn all hope. Stock gone.

You tell yourself it’s fine. “It’s just one stock.” The lie feels comforting for about half a second, until the exact same thing happens again. You never touched them. You never recovered. You never lived.

You lose. They taunt. They emote. They wall hug. They stand perfectly still at the ledge like a main antagonist watching the hero fall into the abyss.

You requeue.

Because of course you do.

Now it’s an Orion player. You spend the next three minutes being politely escorted across the stage by perfectly spaced light attacks, or mercilessly sig-spammed into a different dimension. Every time you try to approach, you are violently reminded that spacing is a concept you clearly never mastered. You get clipped. You get reset. You get deleted.

You check the stats: same ELO. Same. ELO. Plays like a LAN tournament finalist. Totally equal on paper. Absolutely believable. I’m sure they just picked this up yesterday after finishing their PhD in movement tech, gravity cancels, and psychological warfare.

You requeue again.

Lag.

Not mobile lag. Not “weak Wi-Fi” lag. PC lag. The kind that makes you question the fabric of time. You press dodge. Nothing happens. You press attack. It comes out five business days later. Your character teleports backward into a signature you were nowhere near. You lose another stock without ever knowing what actually happened. The replay will not help you. There is no explanation for the war crime you just witnessed.

You lose again.

You realize now.

You were not good.

You were sheltered.

You tell yourself it’s okay. “It’s a free game.” That is another lie. This game is not free. You pay with broken peripherals. You pay with friendships because you snapped at your friend who said “just dodge bro” one too many times.

You decide to take a break from ranked and play experimental. Big mistake. Experimental is where true chaos lives. You will be matched with someone who has 4,000 hours and someone who downloaded the game 11 minutes ago, and somehow you are expected to make this fair. The 4,000-hour player immediately targets you. You are now playing a bullet-hell game where every bullet is a perfectly timed light attack and every mistake costs half your stock.

You think, “I should try a different legend.” So you do. You pick someone new. You tell yourself it’s time to learn. You get matched against a mirror main with ten times your experience. They prove, in real time, why your character is supposedly “broken,” and why you personally are not.

You lose again.

You decide the problem must be your setup. You change your controls. You switch to controller. You watch tutorials. You watch pro players. You learn terms you never wanted to know. You practice in training mode for an hour. You feel improvement.

You requeue.

You lose in two minutes.

Somehow, every player you face has perfect reads. They know when you jump. They know when you dodge. They know when you panic. They know before you do. It feels less like skill and more like clairvoyance. Either everyone in this game is psychic, or my brain is broadcasting my panic on a public radio frequency.

You finally win one match. One single victory. It feels incredible. You feel unstoppable. You feel reborn. You feel like all the suffering was worth it.

Then the next five matches remind you exactly who you are.

You fall three ranks. You fight the same Scythe player twice. You see the same weapon combination three games in a row. Your mental stack overflows. You start questioning your sanity.

At this point you are no longer playing to climb.

You are playing to understand the extent of your own failure.

You uninstall.

Two hours later, you reinstall.

Because Brawlhalla does not let go.

This game has perfect movement, clean mechanics, satisfying hits, great characters, fair balance, rollback netcode, and infinite replayability, yet somehow still manages to feel like a personal attack every single time I boot it up.

I hate this game with every fiber of my being.

Would I recommend it?