The makers of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl announced today that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ April O’Neil and CatDog’s Catdog are joining its already packed roster when the game comes to console and PC later this fall.
Announced during the Future Games Show at Gamescom 2021, these additions bring Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s total revealed fighter count up to 16, with plenty of other fan-favorites like SpongeBob SquarePants, Hey Arnold!’s Helga, and The Wild Thornberrys’ Nigel Thornberry. TNMT’s Leonardo and Michelangelo have also been announced for the game. Hopefully there’s still room to add some of Nickelodeon’s most iconic humans as well.
It looks like April O’Neil, who just this week was also announced to be coming to the arcade beat ‘em up revival, TNMT: Shredder’s Revenge, will be wielding her broadcast news equipment as deadly weapons, while CatDog will mess people up by head-butting them and bashing them with fire hydrants.
Some viewers have already begun deciphering clues for other potential Nick tie-ins. One level shown in today’s gameplay footage includes a cabbage cart which appears to be a reference to a long running gag in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Fans have long suspected Aang and Korra will eventually be revealed to be playable based on the initial game art.
First shown back in July, All-Star Brawl is being made by small Swedish studio Ludosity with co-development help from Fair Play Labs. Licensed Nick games are a dime a dozen, but All-Star Brawl has looked more promising thanks to Ludosity’s background in fighting games and seeming commitment to fostering a competitive scene around the platform fighter.
“Nickelodeon is absolutely on board with having the game be competitively viable,” Ludosity CEO Joel Nyström told Kotaku in an interview last month. “That’s been in the conversation from the start. That’s why they came to us.”
There are also plans to use rollback netcode to try and improve the game’s online multiplayer flow. Unlike traditional netcode, which can have some delays, rollback netcode attempts to predict interim player inputs to keep things moving along faster.
While the 2D side-scrolling presentation and cross-over nature of All-Star Brawl have drawn comparisons to Super Smash Bros., Ludosity says it’s not trying to simply clone Nintendo’s proven formula like it did with its past breakout platform fighter, Slap City.
“If Slap City played a bit like the old Smash games, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl definitely plays like its own thing,” chief designer Elias “sinxtanx” Forslind told Kotaku.
The game is set to come to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC before the end of the year. According to the Steam page, the PC release date is October 5.