BROK: The Brawl Bar (PS5)

BROK the InvestiGator provided a genre blend where sometimes you found yourself solving a point and click mystery and at others you were fighting your way through thugs with your fists in a beat ’em up. The adventure was certainly made more interesting by this mixture, but most any time you combine genres, you might leave a player itching for a bit more time with one half of the experience. BROK: The Brawl Bar aims to provide a lot more action for those eager to get in some more fist fighting, and rather than just being a DLC add-on, BROK: The Brawl Bar is provided as a standalone release on consoles that doesn’t require the original game to own. The Steam releases does require you to own the base game, but while this game has nice ties to the original story that make it better played as a follow-up, this release approach means you can get the brawling content on a different platform if you’d prefer or you can still play this journey even if you had played the original on a physical copy you no longer own. For The Game Hoard though, releasing it separately also made it eligible for coverage, meaning I’d get to revisit the BROK universe and share my thoughts on this new corner of it.

BROK: The Brawl Bar takes place entirely in the titular establishment, but that doesn’t mean it is disconnected from the story of BROK the InvestiGator. This is still the same world where different species of anthropomorphic animals eke out an uneasy coexistence in a post-apocalyptic world. Citizens need to take their Toxout pills so the tainted air won’t take them out, but if they can prove their societal value and earn their way out of the Slums, they’ll be admitted to a domed area called the Drums. There is certainly more to this setting to be discovered in the original game, but this basic set-up is most of what matters for your time at the Brawl Bar, because while all your activities are pretty focused on putting your fists to work this time, you do meet a few interesting characters who are made more complex by how they fit into this world.

The Brawl Bar actually has almost all of its beat ’em up action relegated to special VR chambers, but between the challenges you’ll get to interact with other patrons or the staff. Brok himself is still the lovable, somewhat over the hill ex-boxer he was in BROK the InvestiGator, but most of the cast here is new. Tenderjaw is a retired fighter who runs the bar, the hyena relaxed and chummy in a way that matches Brok’s level of energy well. Meanwhile, the bar’s owner Bubbles is an old toad who doesn’t hide her grumpiness, her monotone making her a great sarcastic foil not just to Tenderjaw but most anyone else in the bar. Puzzles the hedgehog rounds out the gang as the overeager youngster, and while you mostly just see them between challenges, the occasional cutscenes and what you can get out of taking time to chat with them make them an endearing supporting cast. A few other major characters show up, usually other people who use the VR cabinets, and generally if a character is slightly important they’ll have quality voice acting that brings them to life and handles the sometimes difficult balance of them being there as fun opponents to face but also residents of a rough world. BROK: The Brawl Bar likely won’t bum you out despite some of the more serious conversations that crop up here or there, and while the most basic of side characters don’t always have solid voice acting, you can get some fun gags from the people around the bar as well so a chat isn’t always going to lead to some reminder of the sometimes difficult life awaiting these humanoid animals outside of this little bar.

BROK: The Brawl Bar’s main mode of play takes the brawling play from BROK the InvestiGator and beefs it up some, there being over 60 challenges that aren’t just going to be tests of how well you can box some baddies. Brok is the default character, having a good mix of reliable combos, some set-up attacks, and aerial moves plus some special moves with a health or energy cost, but one advantage of all the action being technically in virtual reality here is some challenges are designed for other characters you get to play as. Be it the slow but strong moves of RJ the security guard bear, the swift and aerial friendly actions of Brok’s stepson Graff the cat, or even a pretty straightforward fighting style for one of the generic rat goons, you’ll get a decent mix of different fighting styles that can help shift how a challenge is handled before you even consider the substance of what you’re doing. There are definitely challenges that are basically you being thrown in a space and told to win, enemies from BROK the InvestiGator joined by new faces like Boyd the rooster with an extendable robot arm or Matt the armadillo who has some armor you need to break through before you can really start damaging him. Many of the named characters aren’t pushovers, in fact some of the playable ones can be brutal in the hands of the game’s AI like the unassuming Ott the otter whose basic combo can be unleashed so swiftly it can chew through your health if you let him get going.

These enemies can encourage you to fight smarter at times, even though mashing attack can get you through some early challenges easily enough, but what gives BROK: The Brawl Bar some real spice are the challenges not just focused on beating your foes into submission. Early on you’ll start encountering challenges like breaking all the crates or drinking all the soda items scattered around in a limited amount of time, and it would actually be harder to fail these than succeed. However, these are just the early taste of what makes the challenges much more interesting, because eventually the game moves away from straightforward fights and starts focusing a lot more on unique conditions for the action. For example, one mission involves a character who can throw cups at you altered so each cup is an instant kill if it hits, and to survive you need to figure out the exact way to counter the fact there is two of him present at once. You can’t just punch your way through this problem, but the solution does still involve timing your attacks well and using the right ones to succeed. Some can have more open-ended solutions like a big battle royale that takes place in a gradually shrinking space where being on the outside of the ring means instant death, the exact foes left as the arena shrinks likely to always be different but you still need to make sure you don’t step out of the safe zone as you deal with whoever is left. Some challenges can involve ideas like needing to destroy floating targets in a set amount of time, jumping around a dangerous space, or trying to survive a rain of falling icicles, but BROK: The Brawl Bar doesn’t forget that it is promising brawls so there are challenges that mix up regular fighting a bit more. Usually you can walk all about a battle space, so one fight changes that so everyone is stuck in a 2D plane, making for a more crowded scuffle. Special boss challenges provide foes who can guard much better and exploit your openings, the player needing to get a good understanding of things like the parry that leaves foes briefly vulnerable and learning just how long an opening is so you don’t overextend yourself. Fighting will almost always be the tool being put to the test, the challenges are just willing to get more experimental with it beyond just throwing a steadily changing range of foes at you so that the battling never gets repetitive.

Your reward for completing a challenge takes the form of C-Tokens, these used for a few different things around the Brawl Bar. These can be used to skip challenges that are giving you trouble, although often the tougher challenges are some of the most interesting to figure out and solve, the game not shy about discouraging a skip. The only ones that might be worth skipping are the three quizzes, because while the game lets you opt-in for things that require knowledge of the original BROK the InvestiGator, even the easiest quiz will ask questions that are likely to not even be remembered by a superfan like how many lockers there were at the police station. Another use of dubious importance is the ability to buy helpful items. Some missions have item pick-ups you can grab for a quick heal or a power-up and you can buy some to bring in if you need the extra help, and while they do have more value on Hardcore difficulty, normally challenges are balanced well that items don’t feel necessary for success since you normally needs strategy most to succeed. Having a little safety net in reserve won’t hurt, but it will mean you aren’t spending your C-Tokens on the unlockables, a prize wheel able to get you music for the jukebox, collectible cards, and even bonus challenges. BROK: The Brawl Bar also shows some love for its fans, the pause menu having a huge range of fan art included where each piece costs a single C-Token to see. With there also being an entire unlockable fan game included that uses C-Tokens for continues, there’s usually something interesting to spend them on even if how much you value the options may vary, and after beating the main challenges, you even unlock new ways to play the existing challenges to add some extra longevity for what would otherwise be only a few hours of fun. BROK: The Brawl Bar even allows you to make your own challenges or play the game with other people, multiplayer opening up the doors to co-op challenge tackling or just beating each other up in Versus fights.

THE VERDICT: BROK: The Brawl Bar has a pretty solid beat ’em up base with enemies who ask you to fight with more smarts than rushing in swinging, but it’s the shape of the game’s many challenges that make this standalone DLC really engaging. Changing up the rules so you use your fighting moves for target breaking or adding extra layers to a fight that change how you approach it are common enough to keep things fresh without moving this game fully out of brawler territory. Some fun characters to meet in the bar between bouts gives some lovely life and depth to what could have otherwise been a simple challenge pack, but by also mixing up the rules and throwing in some bonus content like the fan art gallery as well, BROK: The Brawl Bar ends up a surprisingly well-rounded add-on that’s still best experienced after BROK the InvestiGator because it is a bit more than just an excuse for more beat ’em up action.

And so, I give BROK: The Brawl Bar for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. While it would lose some of its texture if played without the greater context of the original BROK adventure, BROK: The Brawl Bar’s story elements can be still understood well enough without it and the action doesn’t depend on familiarity at all. There are characters who make an impression because the hand-drawn art, voice acting, and writing do well with what little space is given to meeting these new faces, but if you did just come for the action, the brawler side is well-considered as well despite its challenge based format. You get to get into some tough fights that do more than throw a new mix of enemy types your way, and to layer on an extra bit of variety you have the small shake-ups like the platforming and target breaking even if those quizzes feel like they get too specific for their own good. Ways to spend your C-Tokens are varied and importantly rarely feel like you’re forced to invest them in ways beyond what you want to, so if you do want to make use of items frequently you can even if that means you’ll need to wait a while to unlock more of the fan art gallery. The adventure is certainly brisk, and when doing the novice challenges initially it can be a touch concerning since they start of fairly easy, but more creative ideas and tougher set-ups do make this into a bit of a thinking man’s brawler at times that pushes it past being a simple challenge mode.

Part of BROK: The Brawl Bar having a standalone release seems to be from the DLC evolving beyond the initial planned scope, and that was definitely to the game’s benefit here. Rather than some brief return to the world of BROK the InvestiGator, ideas were fleshed out so the Brawl Bar had its own interesting characters and some challenges that involved more than being thrown into fight after fight. That extra thought came through and made it so this game didn’t need to be graded on some DLC curve, the action entertaining and diverse despite it only taking a few hours to get through the bulk of the game’s unique content.