Brawlers are one of my favorite games and when I heard that a new brawler title featuring indie characters is coming out, I was extremely hyped for the title. Developed by Dark Screen and published by Merge Games, Bounty Battle is finally available on PC, Xbox One and PS4. Bounty Battle is a classic brawler fighting game in which you fight each other while using some iconic indie characters from your favorite franchises. This is our review of the Xbox One version of Bounty Battle in which we try to win some indie brawler fights.
One of my biggest surprises upon booting Bounty Battle was that there is no online mode in the game. Brawlers like Super Smash Bros Ultimate are a blast to play online with friends and other players from around the world and it massively increases the life of the game. You cannot expect to play a fighting game singleplayer with bots for longer periods of time. You will play for a week or max for two weeks and then get bored and leave the game. However, if the game has an online mode, you will continue to play the game online since it is more fun and also gives you a reason to further hone your fighting skills in the game and keep the game competitive.
Since the online multiplayer mode is completely missing from the game, you have four modes in Singleplayer, Tutorial, Tournament, Challenge, and Training Screen and one Versus mode where you can play local players or CPU wonder your own custom settings. Tutorial and Training Room are there for you to hone your skills while the Tournament allows you to fight in pre-defined fights to progress in a Career-type mode while unlocking new skins for each fighter in the game. Challenge allows you to pick a fighter and fight enemies in a ladder-style game mode. There is nothing more in the game that you can do apart from these modes.
Bounty Battle does feature an impressive character roster. You will find some of the best characters from some great indie games here. Apart from five original characters designed for Battle Bounty, you get a lot of characters from various indie titles such as Guacamelee, Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon, Owlboy, and more. You will find around 30 characters in the game from 20 different indie titles. Each fighter also comes with a unique minion that will support you during battles in various ways. Apart from the familiar characters, the game also features iconic locations from these franchises as well.
Bounty Battle seriously lacks when it comes to combat as well. Bounty Battle is a fighting game so even if the visuals or characters are brilliant, if the gameplay and fighting mechanics are poor, the game cannot be good for anything and this is the case with Bounty Battle. Each fighter only has one move for a light attack and one move for a heavy attack. Combining them together results in useless combos that are extremely difficult to execute in the first place. The combos are simply the moves combined with each other and no new attacks are performed during combos as you would normally expect in a fighting game. There is a weird delay or lag with the heavy attacks which makes landing combos a real problem.
Even with that said, there are extremely low moves for each fighter that makes the fighting tedious and boring. While it comes with a mode that discourages attack spamming and if you fill the spam bar, your character is stunned for a small time but with such small and useless moveset for each of the fighters, you are left with no option but to spam the good attacks if you can find them. It does offer a different variety of jump attacks and up attacks, but they still do not do the characters justice.
The poor animation is a big problem in combat as well. Every axe swing or kick feels extremely lazy and the characters are seriously unbalanced in the game. Lighter enemies can run circles around the heavy fighters and during the time a heavy fighter can actually swing their attack, the lighter fighter will easily counter the attack and interrupt your sorry attempt of an attack. You can also spawn minions when you reach a certain number of Bounty Points, but they are not that effective in battles much. My minions usually just kept floating over the field and doing nothing while I fell prey to the poor combo mechanics of the game.
Each fighter in the game also comes with a unique Ultimate Move and one Special Attack. Most of the heavy attacks and the Special attacks and many other actions in the game consume energy however, it regenerates fairly quickly in the game. Some of the characters’ Special Moves are pretty disappointing as well as one hero was simply kicking the opponents as a special move. The ultimate attacks do not differ from the mainstream attacks as well, and they are only powerful variants of their normal attacks in most cases. This makes them useless in most cases and even after spending around 7-8 hours in the game, I still cannot figure out what the Ultimate or Special attack of some of the characters actually do.
Apart from the weak combat mechanics, Bounty Battle is filled with technical problems. I was testing the game out on an Xbox One X with a 500GB SSD and even then, the game felt like it was hanging and freezing every time it had to load something. The framerate was cancerous as sometimes that game came to a complete stop before resuming. Most of the battles with one player went fine however when the game threw more than one opponent at me, it became a presentation with screens shifting only after I was done reading the current image.
The game stuttering was more with multiple players on the screen and it was pretty disappointing as well because you do not just play brawlers with just two players. These games are all about causing as much mayhem on the same screen as possible but sadly Bounty Battle does not allow you that because when more players jump in the game, it becomes a stutter-fest. With the massive frame drops, it becomes almost impossible to play the game let alone unleash some killer combos which is already a hassle in the game.
When I first heard about Bounty Battle and got to know about what type of title it was, I was extremely excited because it has some of my favorite characters from some of my favorite indie games. I am a big brawler fan and I have hours invested in both Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Sony All-Stars Battle Royale that I cannot even count at this point but I was extremely disappointed when I booted up Bounty Battle and eventually jumped into a battle in the game. While is does bring many interesting concepts to the table, sadly the execution is very poor and I am surprised how this game even got past the final testing and quality-control with so many bugs and problems still in the game. I do hope that developers actually work on the game and try to fix the problems with it in the future.
Final Verdict:
Bounty Battle presents a remarkably interesting idea with all indie characters fighting in a brawler-type fighting arena, but it seriously lacks in terms of gameplay. The controls feel laggy and the animations are not crisp making executing combos a real challenge. I really liked the character design and the amount of characters in the game is decent as well. However, when it comes to combos and playing games, Bounty Battle seriously lacks at this point. The combat does not feel satisfying at all and even with a lot of practice, it still feels empty and pointless. None of the victories give you a sense of real victory and most of the time you are left feeling wanting for more. In my opinion, stay away from it and stick to games that have proven their worth in the genre. Play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or even PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale but do not waste your time on this game. Still, if you want to try it out, here is an Xbox One store link for the game.
Final Verdict: 4.0/10
