Christian Donlan is a game critic and author. You can read his piece on Marvel Snap here.
Years ago I was at a Develop Conference in Brighton when the keynote speaker chose to talk about friction. It was Dave Perry, of Shiny Entertainment, and his main point was pretty simple. Sometime today, Perry predicted, something’s going to happen that is more annoying than it needs to be. It won’t work quite the way you expect. It will throw in too many steps. More than anything, it will take a little longer than it should.
Those cash machines where you have to enter your PIN and then press enter too. Those pop-ups that require two clicks of the little X to close. This is friction. And Perry said it was everywhere in games.
This is why I love Brawl Stars so much. But actually, wait, we have to go back a little bit – I’m dumping in a little bit of friction right now because I’m a monster – to really explain why that is.
I love battle royale games. I particularly love Fortnite. I love the clarity of knowing that all I have to do is kill 99 other players. I love the freedom to roam across a massive landscape and forget what I’m meant to be doing in the first place. But 99 other players and massive landscapes all mean that Fortnite takes a while to play. This isn’t friction, it’s just a consequence of scope. But there is friction in there too, and combined with scope it makes a game that is often almost too long for me to consider often absolutely too long.
This friction? It’s tiny. But that’s the point with friction – a tiny wait can be one tiny wait too many. So there’s matchmaking, which takes longer than I would like. And then I’m on the starter island. I love the starter island, but I often don’t want it at the start when I’m ready to really play. Then the bus flies in and there’s a tiny gap before I can jump out. It’s so much small potatoes, but what would the game be like without it?
Stuff like this, and I’m almost ashamed to admit this, is part of why Brawl Stars is now my battle royale of choice. Supercell’s game isn’t purely a battle royale, of course. It’s a top-down PvP blaster, I guess, with unlockable heroes and a range of modes that take in things like territory capture and football. But one of those modes, Showdown, is battle royale. And it is beautiful.
It’s beautiful because it’s so compact. A small map, and one that gets smaller pretty quickly. Ten players tops and the shooting starts almost immediately. Crucially, match-making is blink-of-an-eye territory and even the longest of games is unlikely to last 90 seconds. Gorgeous stuff.
There is more to it than briskness, of course. One of my favourite things about Showdown is that it borrows the long grass from MOBAs (and Pokémon, I suppose) so you can spend your round hiding in the grass and being annoying to your enemies by popping out when they least expect it. But this grass also gets at how beautifully balanced Brawl Stars is, because while enemies can’t see you in the grass, you can’t see them either. I’ll often be hiding there, nice and smug, and I’ll wander straight into someone who’s so overpowered that they can kill me sneezing. Serves me right.
And how do you power up? Also a beautiful thing. You earn power-up tokens by blasting crates scattered around the arena, or by blasting powered-up players and defeating them. These crates work so well because they tempt you to put yourself in danger. Every attack in Brawl Stars comes with a cooldown, so when you’re spending time and damage on crates, you’re leaving yourself exposed.
Onwards and outwards it goes. Beautiful characters who all come with their own weapons; a control scheme that quietly scales to your ability or patience, with a stab of the action button to fire at the nearest enemy but a stretch of the action button to allow you to aim more precisely; maps that swap in and out of rotation and change the kinds of strategies that are available from the off.
It’s lovely stuff, and when all these wild characters are having at it – cowboys, squat little mechs, crows, something that seems to have been inspired by Mr Frosty, the beloved snowcone maker – well, it’s a bit like playing with your old action figures on the good carpet in the living room. Actually, what Brawl Stars really reminds me of is that wonderful moment in Close Encounters when the aliens accidentally activate all of the kid’s electronic cars and Speak-and-Spells and whatnot, and they all converge, squawking, under the mother’s bed: Look with care/for the shape of a square.
All of this surprised me, I should add. I am surprised that I fell for Brawl Stars so thoroughly. I approach each Supercell game with caution these days. I know this sounds weird. Supercell makes some of the best stuff out there, with an astonishing success rate in terms of blockbuster mobile games. But the reason for that success rate is partly down to the fact that the studio is ruthless about cutting games that don’t quite come together perfectly. They’d be good enough for a lot of other outfits – I still wish on every shooting star for your return, Rush Wars. But for Supercell? Supercell is terrifyingly willing to pull the plug on something that is only going to make millions rather than bajillions.
This meant that for a little while at the very start I circled Brawl Stars without fully committing. If I was going to fall for this thing, how long would I be able to enjoy it? And Brawl Stars, on the surface, looked a lot like the kind of game that Supercell might dabble with and then feed to the feral hogs in the company backyard.
Why? It had a chunky 3D art style, and that felt like a departure from the Clash games I already knew so well. It didn’t appear to connect with the medieval-themed Clash universe at all, in fact. Mostly, though, there was that word “brawl” in the title. Brawl Stars. I see Supercell as a team that takes a micro-surgical approach to its games. Clash Royale is pretty much tweezered together in a controlled environment, not a single pixel out of place. But a game about brawling? I closed my eyes and saw windmilling fists, heads going through juke boxes, old Burt Reynolds movies. What was all this roughhousing?
It turns out all this roughhousing is absolutely magic. And Brawl Stars is clearly making bajillions because, years later, it’s still with us. It’s still odd. It’s still colourful and knockabout and silly. And it’s still battle royale with absolutely no friction at all.
