Creepy Brawlers

Genre: Boxing

Players: 1

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Review:

Creepy Brawlers is a Boxing game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo Switch in 2019 that has you fighting in a boxing ring in Punch-Out!!-style matches against various classic movie monsters. And yes, you read that right, this game was released on the dusty old Nintendo Entertainment System console in 2019. That’s one of the unique signatures of developer Mega Cat Studios, designing new games for retro systems. While I leave it to you whether to see this as targeting a very niche market or trying to gain attention with an odd gimmick, in this review I’m playing the Nintendo Switch version, which is identical to the NES version of the game, with all of that game’s limitations intact.

Yes, that means that this game suffers from the hardware limitations of the 1985 console, which means pixel art visuals with an extremely limited color palette, and chiptune audio that’s similarly limited. Depending on how you look at it, this may make this game’s presentation nostalgic or dated. But unfortunately regardless of how you see it, even for the limitations of the day, this seems highly restrictive in a way that negatively affects the experience.

Since this game is clearly inspired by Punch-Out!!, that would seem to be the best point of comparison – where Punch-Out!! featured colorful visuals that highlighted the cartoonish nature of its characters, Creepy Brawlers looks washed out, with its combatants often blending into the boxing ring they’re fighting in. Where Punch-Out!! featured memorable themes that rose above the limited chiptune sound of the NES, Creepy Brawlers tries to lean into its movie monster motif with more dour and subdued themes, only occasionally becoming interesting when you hear a lick of classical music worked into the theme. This is a game that often feels like it’s highlighting the weaknesses of the NES, rather than its strengths.

Having said that, I do appreciate that this game is doing something different by making your opponents signature movie monsters (or at least their non-copyrighted generic counterparts). Fighting Bald Bull or King Hippo in Punch-Out!! may have had its charms, but it’s no less amusing to fight Frankenstein or a killer bride seemingly styled after The Ring’s creepy girl, Samara, and this game does a good job making each of its characters fairly distinct.

The core gameplay here is solid, though this hardly comes as a surprise – it’s pretty much identical to classic Punch-Out!! (albeit a tad more stiff), with low and high punches for left and right, left and right dodges, a simple block, and special attacks that in this game are used as a counter after dodging an attack. It’s a straightforward system that still works well enough here, with the opponents providing the variety your own attacks don’t offer.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to learn your opponents’ patterns in Creepy Brawlers, at least compared to Punch-Out!!, where most opponents would let you get in a few odd punches even if you didn’t know their patterns by heart. Here, you either know your opponents’ patterns and succeed, likely without much effort… or you haven’t figured them out yet and will fail spectacularly.

Even more unfortunately, this game is extremely unforgiving of this failure – there are no extra lives or continues here, just three knockouts before you’re down for good and need to restart the campaign from the beginning. The game thankfully does let you practice against opponents you’ve already gone up against in the campaign mode, but this still means that you’ll likely be locked in the cycle of going through the campaign once for each new opponent, losing miserably, then heading into the practice mode to figure out their pattern before going in, soundly beating them, and losing miserably to the next opponent. I can’t help but feel like this game could have learned a bit more from Punch-Out!! in this regard – that game allowed players to have a few continues, at least.

Still, despite its overly difficult challenge level and dull presentation, it’s hard not to like Creepy Brawlers. The core gameplay is solid, the theme is fantastic and original, and the variety in opponents is quite good. If only this game offered a somewhat better presentation, loosened up the controls a bit, and was a bit more forgiving in its difficulty, this could be a worthy successor to the game that clearly inspired it. Instead, it’s a worthy effort, and for $5 it’s one that fans of that classic game should definitely play, even with all its flaws.

tl;dr – Creepy Brawlers is a Boxing game best described as a reimagining of the Classic Nintendo Entertainment System game Punch-Out!! with players fighting various classic movie monsters. While not nearly as good as that Nintendo classic, and overly tough, it’s still a solid Boxing game in its own right, and the $5 price tag makes this game well worth a look for fans of that NES classic.

Grade: C+

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