Bakugan: Battle Brawlers PS3 Review

Bakugan: Battle Brawlers PS3 Review


Bakugan Battle Brawlers is aimed to set you into the world of the popular cartoon show and let you become a legendary Brawler, does it succeed? Not at all.

The story is a simplistic one that more or less falls in with the cartoon show, hoverever your not playing a character from the show. One day you meet Dan Kuso (the main protaginist of the cartoon) who teaches you how to brawl and after a lot of text reading and X pressing you get you're Bakugan, Leonidas. Leonidas falls from the sky and befriends yourself but when introduced to other Bakugan isn't looked upon well, Leonidas seems to have a lot of hate in him. You and Leo decided to try and become the number one Bakugan Brawler in the world and set of to beat others. Story is simplistic but gets some good tie ins to the original show.

Gameplay is a very simple and basic idea that gets quite annoying. You have two options for play in story mode a tournament that more or less carries the story and each tournament focuses on a different theme. The park is where you can more or less do freeplay battles to build up you're BP points which you can then go spend at the shop. The shop doesn't hold much for interest, you can buy Bakugan, upgrade Bakugan and then buy some more cards. Seeing as in your home you can switch around your cloths you'd think you could buy more in the shop right? Wrong. Your home also has a stats screen and some other useless stuff you'll never touch without accidentally falling asleep on your remote from boredom.

On the battle system itself, it has to be one of the most annoying ones in any game ive played. You enter a battle and put out field cards each with there own effects and powers depending on your status and Bakugan attribute. This all sounds very well close to the show so far and so is part two, throwing your Bakugan. You hold down R2 and release with a kind of throwing motion on the controller to throw your Bakugan into the air holding R2 and the controller down will make the Bakugan roll faster and let you steer it, holding the controller backwards slower. This allows you to steer around the field to collect power ups that around them and then land on your card (or not.) When it gets to the battling system thats where you lose everything, there are three mini game in the battle system, shaking, timing and shooting. Timing is as it sounds, pressing assigned buttons when the timing is right. Shooting involves you shooting your Bakugans attribute symbol. Shaking, the most annoying one, involves as it sounds shaking the controller until your arm flies of across the room.
All this is to build up you're Bakugans power (making upgrading your bakugans power in the first place unnecessary), you can also use cards before this to upgrade your power but the CPU will just keeping using its cards until your even, making it stupid.
You win the match by winning three gate cards from battling, standing or doubling standing. Double standing is when you get two of the same Bakguan on a gate card and standing is then you have all your Bakugan on the field and no one gets attacked for a turn.

Outside the story mode theres is a some what arcade mode where you can play as any of the players against any of the players in any field in any gameplay mode type. Single (Player Vs CPU) Tag Team (Player & CPU VS two CPUs) and Battle Royale (Four players against each other.) The only real point of this mode is the ability to play as other players, the rest of it can be done in the park in the story mode.

The game doesn't look all that bad, the character models copy there cartoon counter parts very well and the cinematic sequences seem to have been cut right from the show. The battlefields are filled with the attribute its specializing in and you'll tell with all the color and look. However the sound in this game is more annoying than the gameplay. Everytime i played Bakguan: Battle Brawlers i had to mute it and insert my i-pod headphones to escape from some of the most annoying music Ive ever heard in a game for a long time.

I know this game was properly aimed at kids and even fans of the show but i don't see how either will get the atmosphere from the show in this, or any fun from it. The battle system is so annoying Ive gone and explained it in full so no one buys this crap. Spend your money on the original shows DVD for fans and there are a lot better kids games out there.

Story: 6.5

Gameplay: 3.5

Presentation: 6.5

Sound: 3

Replay Value: 4.5

Overall: 4.8