I recently had a chance to check out the Punch-Out!! inspired Halloween fighter Creepy Brawlers for the Nintendo Switch. This game features classic movie monsters as you beat them to a pulp Punch-Out!! style. In fact this game was released on a actual NES cart for those hardcore collectors out there. Let’s see if the gameplay here makes me remember the good old days of my childhood.
Creepy Brawlers looks like a game I would have bought and played on NES back in the day. The graphics look great for an 8-bit game. You can tell lots of love was put into the sprite work in order to achieve the best looking game possible with the limitations of the old NES hardware. Animations are a little clunky, but this could just be me. I haven’t really played an NES game in long time, and maybe they were always like this.
Gameplay here is a lot like Punch-Out!! The much larger opponent stands in front of you. You will face off against monsters such as The Bride, Frankenstein, Wolfman and many more. Players then must duck, dodge and counter their way to victory. If you dodge and counter with great timing you will land a counter punch that deals some extra damage. I had a really hard time dodging in this one. The controls felt really stiff and this game is pretty unforgiving in its difficulty. There is a training mode that helps a little bit.
Since the setting of this game is old monster films, stages are divided up into movies with a few fights in each one. Think of this like circuits in Punch-Out!! There are some pretty funny dialogue interactions when fights begin. One of these is when you first start the game and your fighter thinks he just had bad popcorn. Though with the aforementioned difficulty you will be putting in a lot of effort to see the end of the game. The title does feature some in-game achievements that include things blocking 100 punches, getting up from stunning your enemy X number of times and more for those willing to put in the effort to earn them.
While I can safely say Creepy Brawlers is not for me, I feel like there is an audience for a game like this. Nostalgia nuts who are into monster movies will likely really love what they find here. I felt the difficulty spikes were just too much even for a game that was trying to make itself “NES Hard.” The controls felt a bit sluggish when trying to dodge and the unforgiving nature of the fights here make that a bad combination. The game is reasonably priced at $4.99, so if you have even a passing interest in it you may as well give it a shot. It may be more to your liking than it was mine.
