Brainrot: Fighting

Genre: Fighting

Players: 1

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Review:

Every now and then, something pops up to remind me just how old I am. Sometimes, it’s an anniversary of something that didn’t seem like it happened all that long ago. For example, 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the very first Guitar Hero game, Resident Evil 4, and the Xbox 360. 20 years! Sometimes the reminder of my age comes in the form of the passing of some celebrity who’s always been around, such as this year’s deaths of Gene Hackman, Val Kilmer, Ozzy Osbourne, and Robert Redford. However, there’s another thing I’ve encountered lately that makes me feel old that I never saw coming, even though Grandpa Simpson warned us all about this decades ago – popular trends that seem strange and off-putting to me, and just do not make sense.

Yes, this is my intro to Brainrot, because I’m just not sure where to start with this, and even trying to explain it makes me feel old. As I understand it, and I freely admit I may be wrong… Brainrot, more formally known as Italian Brainrot, is a 2025 internet meme or collection of memes involving AI-generated characters that look like bizarre anthropomorphized objects and animal-thing hybrids. These include a shoe-wearing shark named Tralalero Tralala, a baseball bat-wielding tall drum thing named Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and Ballerina Cappuccina, who is a ballerina with a coffee cup as a head. These characters have established various relationships, gotten their own theme songs, and even have cryptocurrencies based on them. Look, I had to learn all of this for this review, so now you have to also.

Anyway, apparently one common type of video involved in this meme is having these characters fight, so it seemed like a pretty natural extension of this idea to incorporate these characters into a Fighting game, especially since they don’t seem to be owned by anyone and any developer can apparently just snatch them up for their own use. With the 2025 release of Brainrot: Fighting, this is exactly what seems to have happened.

Of course, being a popular property that could be used by anyone means there’s no barrier to entry here, which means you’re looking at a game that is exceptionally poorly put-together. And once again, I don’t even know where to begin, because so much is wrong here.

Unlike most Fighting games, players can only select one character to start with, the aforementioned Ballerina Cappuccina. To unlock the rest, you’ll need to fight computer-controlled opponents to earn in-game currency to spend on each of them individually. However, the rate at which you earn this currency is absurdly slow, and the fights you’ll participate in get repetitive very fast – I found myself pushed into multiple matches against a beaver named Bobrito Bandito, as well as numerous mirror matches against another Ballerina Cappuccina.

While it appears that there may have been an intent to have multiple selectable locations, I could only find a way to fight in one, a dingy yard in front of an ugly-looking factory. The 3D background visuals here have low-poly terrain and structures, and while the 3D characters themselves are more detailed, they animate in an amateurish, awkward-looking manner. These visuals are joined by the game’s soundtrack which seems to be heavily-accented rap that I can only guess is related to the meme.

The mechanics here seem to me like what you’d get if you told someone to design a Fighting game after they had only played one once years ago, and told them they only had a week to do it. As such, you have multiple attack buttons and attack-direction combinations, as well as a block when you hold away from the opponent, but everything else feels very, very wrong.

The hit detection is terrible, movement feels sluggish, jumping similarly feels clunky and useless, there’s apparently no hitstun and as such no real combos, and there are no special moves that I could find, but that’s just as well because it seems like your best bet is just to press right toward your opponent and button-mash. With Ballerina Cappuccina, I could win every battle simply by holding the analog stick to the right and then mashing the A button when I was within range of her opponent. The opponent would attack back, unstunned, but since I wasn’t stunned by their attack either, I could win simply by not letting up in my attack and winning the ensuing battle of attrition.

There you go, that’s all you need to do to win battle after battle in this game – keep moving to the right and button-mash. There are boss battles in the game, but these are indistinguishable from standard battles, with the same opponents using the same losing moves against you. Oh, and if you’re thinking “well, maybe the AI sucks but I can at least get a challenge by playing against a buddy”, no you can’t, because this game only supports single-player play.

In short, Brainrot: Fighting is a lazy, low-effort, shoddily-constructed attempt to cash in on a meme. And I may be too old and out-of-touch to appreciate that meme, I assure fans of these characters that they won’t enjoy this game either, because it was made purely to exploit their fandom to paper over an absolutely terrible product. Whether or not you’re into this Brainrot stuff, do not buy this game.

tl;dr – Brainrot: Fighting is a Fighting game starring characters from the Brainrot internet meme. Regardless of whether or not that appeals to you, this game is absolute trash, poorly-made garbage pushed out to exploit this meme’s fandom. It’s ugly, feature-poor, with misguided progression, and some of the worst gameplay I have ever encountered in a Fighting game. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy this meme, do not buy this game.

Grade: F

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