Brawl Busters - Overview

I've been playing a bit of Brawl Busters the last few days. For those of you who don't know, Brawl Busters is a F2P multiplayer combat game. There are five different classes and several game modes such as fighting zombies and other critters to 4 on 4  team PVP combat. As you play through the game you get XP which increases your level and unlocks certain items and allows you to choose more classes as well as an in-game currency.

Things I like:

• Game is easy to pick up and play - The game starts with a series of one player tutorial missions that teach you the basics of the game and mechanics as well as allowing you to try all five classes to get a taste of them.
• Balance - Even though sometimes a person will just beat the tar out of me a couple times in a level, I never really feel as if any of the classes are overpowered. Plus, if you decide you don't like a class, you can switch to a different one mid match.
• Controls - The game usually feels responsive and the controls are easy to learn as well as customizable.
• Simplicity - The premise is simple and the objectives are obvious: kill people on the other team.
• Levels aren't important -  Just because a person is a higher level, that doesn't mean they're better than you. It just means they've played longer than you. I've already had several matches where I lead in kills/assists as the lowest level person on the team.
• Pay items aren't horribly overpowered - Items you buy from the real money store are either temporary, cosmetic, or obtainable through the free in-game currency.

Things I don't like:

• Matchmaking - The current lobby-based system kinda sucks. You're at the mercy of people jumping in and out of games or you have to wait on people to click "ready" before you can start matches. Sometimes this makes it hard for you to find a game to play right away. It's always a bummer when you have to wait longer than a match would last to find one to play.
• Items don't always work - One of the key mechanics of the game is breaking pieces of the environment (chairs, lampposts, garbage cans, etc) and getting items out of them. Sometimes it seems as if the items just completely miss even from point blank range. It's probably a latency issue but it can be annoying when you're being beaten on someone and you pop your item to get out of the situation and it doesn't do anything.

I'll get into more details about some of this stuff in future posts.