And have only one thing to say, twice: HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE!
You may look at this title and be thinking one of two things, either this game is going to be horrible or its going to be amazing. Well let me save you the trouble of staring at it any longer, its downright horrible. Now first things first, I only bought this game because I found for a great deal, 10 dollars. This game is nowhere near worth anything more than that. Well lets get started.
Bakugan Battle Brawlers takes you into the world of Bakugan. You'll get to design your own character, you get all of 5 options to choose from in each category, each being pretty bad. The hair was outrageous, the shoes were ugly, the glasses were just plain weird, and there's no female model. But all of thats besides the point. Next you'll choose what attribute you want to pick. I find this very pointless, the only thing this affects is the secondary color of your clothes and the attribute of your future guardian. So after you're done with your character the story will start. There's not much of one, it'll be you meeting Dan Kuso, the main protagonist from the anime and battling through a bunch of tournaments to try and be number 1 Bakugan Battle Brawler! This is even more boring than it sounds. They try to make things interesting by making each tournament have a new field (based on a certain attribute) and certain battle rules, ranging form 1 on 1 to a 4 player free for all. Of course the obvious inclusion of some random baddie comes in but he's not even worth mentioning, he's just another character to beat in a tournament.
During the gameplay you'll set a card on the field, known as a gate card. The goal is to try to roll your Bakugan onto the card in order to eventually start a battle with the other Bakugan. Now the real life game itself already has wobbly rules, but this game doesn't even follow those rules! So you'll roll your Bakugan around the field collecting power ups and sometimes some speical ability cards. When rolling you'll have a set time before your Bakugan stops. Being one of the bigger points of the actual game you'd think this would be pretty fun, nope! Rolling is simply flicking the stylus foward and then steering with the D-Pad. Each Bakugan has a G-Power and when its battling this power will determine the outcome, right? Nope! The battles are completely reliant on annoying mini games that the AI doens't even pretend to try playing and who's only purpose seems to be to scratch up your DS' screen. This essentially makes even the power ups on the field useless. When the battle ends you get to see your Bakugan attack the opponent's and then gameplay on the field resumes. Then you can set more gate cards if you wish or just start rolling more Bakugan again. The biggest thing that bothered me besides the unattractive play style was watching a short cutscene every time someone; rolls a Bakugan, sets a gate card, plays an ability card, or wins. Sure you can skip them with the Start button but unless you're a lefty then you're going to get pretty annoyed with it. They also force you to see when the opponents actually is rolling, you get to see all the power ups they pick up and where they roll around to before landing on the gate card. At least the developers figured out to allow you to skip during two COM players battling, however if one COM player is on your team then you'll want to see it to help them out before their stupid AI takes over and makes them lose. Even worse is that they slightly allow you to play around with your opponent's roll. Whats the point of that? I'd blow into the mic and their Bakugan would jump up, but it serves no purpose as they have more than enough time to recover from their (your) folley and get onto a card. The AI in this game is pretty horrible. The players will use cards that just don't match with their Bakugan or will use cards that won't even affect the battle at all. I once had someone take away my boost from the gate card as well as theirs, unfortunately we both had the same boost, a boost of 20! Then when rolling, they will roll on their partner's card, which is pretty much just wasting their turn! But there is one more dissapointment in this game, there's no multiplayer! None! If this game was SOlitaire DS then I'd let it slide but this is a game meant for people to enjoy together. Why would you not put any multiplayer into this game, that just doesn't make any sense. After battling enough your Bakugan will leavel up. Their G-Power will increase and you'll have the option to add an extra point to a pointless stat, which barely (if at all) affects the game.
The sounds in this game are generally hard to rate. The voices are pretty annoying, but the music is suprisingly nice. I have to admit that I was actually moving to some of these songs as well as humming along with them. But as I stated previously having to hear these characters say "Bakugan brawl!" or "Gate card set!" or whatever else they want to yell out at the screen in attempts to breaking the 4th wall makes me want to turn the volume on my DS down despite the music.
And last but not least, the graphics. For the DS they're pretty nice, the arenas are colorful and inviting, and the Bakugan characters are quite nice. The actual humans are the only problem I see at all, especially when I was creating my character and his glasses were practically half-way down his face. I was pretty close up in that menu though, and generally the characters look ok from far away. The menus are boring though, and the sprites for your Bakugan are so small that you'll have to remember what Bakugan you're using because theres no way you'll see these characters in pitcures smaller than half your pinky's fingernail. The rest of the menus are just bland, they could have easily filled the screen with bigger pictures of your Bakugan team but they didn't and so you'll be looking at a pretty big menu of red and black shades.
Overall you probably figured out this game is pretty bad, and it is. I could see some younger kids enjoying it, maybe around 6-10 years old, but even they'll get bored of it eventually. I'm not going to say that the game was all bad, because I found myself gradually getting more and more into it but its just plain not worth it when it comes to the price. You might as well buy the actual game pieces as you'll have much more fun for the price of 30 dollars with those than with this. You could also play with friends and familly in that case, so that you aren't all huddled around a single DS watching a very boring battle. If you can find this game for a cheap price however, then go for it, it'll offer a few hours of entertainment. Then you can go give it back to Gamestop for a tiny bit of your money back. Bottom line, don't expect much out of this game. They oculd have done much better by just putting the real game into a cartridge and sticking multiplayer into it.
Bottom Line: Suckage on an epic level
And yeah, I wrote this not intending it for use here so some of it may be a "yeah duh!" to you but I just wanted to express how badly this game fails. And you'll also see me holding back constantly during the whole thing. And yes, lotsa typos.
