Paperbound Brawlers

Genre: Arcade / Action-Platformer / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team Competitive

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Review:

Paperbound Brawlers is an arena-based multiplayer-focused Arcade-style Action-Platformer and Party Game where players clash in battles that have players manipulating gravity to strike at enemies. This game was originally released on PC and PlayStation 4 under the simple title Paperbound before being brought to Nintendo Switch in 2019 and Xbox One in 2020.

The presentation here is a bit difficult to describe. The game seems to start off with the intention of everything in the game taking place in books with stick figures fighting using pencils, ink, and scissors. However, between all the odd level designs and the wide assortment of guest characters, this visual style seems to have gotten lost at some point. This would have been fine if not for the fact that the visual style we’ve been left with can make it difficult at times to make out where your character is in all of the chaos and confusion of battle, especially when bits and pieces are flying all around the arenas. The music here seems similarly confused – it’s not bad, but the dramatic orchestral pieces the game uses seem to shout that this is a serious fantasy epic instead of a silly arena fighting game.

At the very least, as a silly fighting game, Paperbound Brawlers does work, though its best features also seem to be its more problematic flaws. When this game works well, it’s a blast to play, with players defying gravity and leaping across the screen to get at each other, or making a skillful use of a projectile weapon toss. Wind-down from attacks mean that players who swipe at an enemy and miss are extra vulnerable to counter-attack, and so there’s a good dance of positioning and trading of blows going on here to make for some good strategy, even with a limited number of attack types.

Having said that, the game’s gravity-manipulation mechanic is very difficult to control reliably. Pressing the button to reverse gravity makes gravity flip 180 degrees from your current position, but players can also alter gravity by moving around a rounded edge, with gravity following them as they do so. In addition, players can move in mid-air, and the result of all of this is that it can sometimes be difficult to follow exactly which way gravity is going at any given moment.

The other issue I kept slamming into here is that the game’s control setup feels a bit awkward and unintuitive for me, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to reassign buttons. I ultimately found myself ignoring the jump button entirely, both because the gravity-shifting made it feel unreliable and because I didn’t need one more button to remember in the game’s awkward controls, especially when the gravity-shifting would suffice well enough in place of jumping most of the time anyway.

In the end, there’s a lot to like about Paperbound Brawlers, and overall I’d say it makes for a good arena-based Party game, but it also feels really rough around the edges, with elements of both the presentation and the gameplay that could stand to be greatly improved. As-is, it’s still a fun entry into its genre whose gravity-shifting mechanic is unique enough to set it apart, but it doesn’t quite reach its full potential.

tl;dr – Paperbound Brawlers is a multiplayer-focused arena-based Arcade-style Action-Platformer and Party game where players attack each other while shifting gravity to move around the arena. There’s some fun and original gameplay here, but it feels rough and lacks some polish that could have greatly improved it. Overall it’s a worthwhile entry into its genre, but one with a lot of room for improvement.

Grade: C+

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