Long gone are the days when you and your friends would gather at each other’s houses to have a couple of hours of fun playing video games, either in teams or against each other. Unfortunately now everything is online only which requires all of you to have your own console and the same games so that you can play against each other. Luckily there are some games that still try to keep that couch multiplayer experience alive and one of them is the Xbox One version of Forge Reply’s game, In Space We Brawl, previously released on Steam. Sadly the game doesn’t exactly succeed for too long before becoming stale and boring. In Space We Brawl is a twin-stick space shooter developed with local competitive multiplayer gameplay as its goal. The core objective of the game is to blow each other up using a variety of spaceships and weapons available to choose from, along with a variety of space locations to serve as battle arenas.
If you have ever played any arcade game in your life, In Space We Brawl is fairly simple to play. Your goal is to win the rounds and to do so you just have to shoot everything that moves. Even if you aren’t an expert or skilled enough, the game offers a wide variety of ways for you to score points. You can earn points by shooting everything that appears on the map, from asteroids to enemy NPC ships. Even being able to survive for a period of time without getting damage will earn you points. Seeing a shooting game like this escape from the regular approach of just getting points by destroying enemies is something that opens up the game’s player base to more that just twin-stick shooters fans and experts.
Unfortunately, the scoring system of In Space We Brawl is the only good aspect of it. Everything else seems to lack or fail in meeting the required expectations that could keep players interested in the game. Even the game modes, Arena and Challenge, tend to be a bit repetitive after a while. The Challenge mode kind of works like a tutorial where you will be introduced to the game and how to play it. You will learn everything about the basics of offense, defense, maneuverability, accuracy and the overall techniques of the game. It’s definitely recommended to start the game by playing the Challenge mode, especially to learn about the meters that are displayed around your ship. Everything in the game-weapons, boosts, and shields-are based on those meters. Those meters on their own have a few issues though. One of them is the fact that they drain too fast and once you get them depleted you won’t be able to attack or defend yourself.
The Arena mode is actually divided into three modes that are very similar to each other. In Gladiator mode you will be facing three other opponents, that can either be human or AI, and the winner will either be the last one to survive or the one with more points when the time runs out. The other two modes, Tournament and Championship, are very similar to each other and players will fight against each for several rounds until either the time ends and the one with more points wins or someone reaches the designated score. None of the Arena modes actually offer much and all of them become boring after a while.
A good feature of In Space We Brawl is the amount of spaceships and weapons available to choose from. There are a total of fifteen spaceships and sixteen weapons to choose from, and all of them can be combined with each others, giving you a total of 240 different combinations. Each spaceship and weapon has its own unique attributes and it is up to you to decide which is more suitable to your gameplay. Although there are some minor differences between each spaceship, they still feel a bit generic. The twitchy control scheme doesn’t exactly help in improving that, and even the maps themselves can purge the fun after awhile.
Summary
It’s great to see a game that still tries to keep old couch competitive multiplayer gameplay alive, but unfortunately, In Space We Brawl isn’t exactly the best game out there for that. The game fails to keep the player interested in it for more than a couple of games until the lack of variety and overall claustrophobic and chaotic arenas start to slowly take the fun out of it. The Challenge mode does a good job explaining the basic mechanics and concepts of the game, but rather than that doesn’t offer much as well. In my opinion, In Space We Brawl is a game to avoid, the concept is interesting, but the lack of content ruins the game’s experience.
João is a games journalist, Senior Editor at XDA Developers. They contributed 156 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: previously reported for Neowin before joining XDA Developers in 2021, where he leads coverage of Windows, Microsoft, and hardware.