Portal Brawlers Preview – Gameplay Video

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Published on Apr 22, 2024

About :

I'm turning into a fan of Crystal Spider Games and their work. Their approach to blockchain based gaming is refreshing in an environment where the game itself comes second to selling NFTs and turning a profit. If you don't already know them, Crystal Spider Games is a game studio building games on Hive.

They don't have any finished games just yet, but they already have several demos out of different genre games that they are building that you can tRY out right nOW, including the one I'm showcasing today.

They're also a very community oriented company with emphasis on the InLeo community, rewarding players with upvotes for making the leaderboards in their games and creating content for them. I've received many upvotes already for my engagement with their projects, and I can testify that they're very diligent.

L1 Hive NFTs + Marketplace

But what probably excites me the most about this company is that they have developed a system to create layer 1 NFTs on Hive, which is (if you didn't know) a huge deal. aLL NFTs on Hive are currently residing on the layer 2 in non-human-readable format, with the image being the sold as the "NFT" when in fact it is not. As @simplegame explains in his latest video (where he also explains this much better than me by the way): "Forget about images, it's the human readable data that's important".

Portal Brawlers - How does it play? [SPOILER ALERT]

I'm not really a game reviewer, but I think I have a pretty good idea about how games should "feel".

Gameplay Style / Genre

It's a classic brawler beat-em-up type game similar to Battle Toads and TNMNT on the SNES, but instead featuring Crystal Spider Games own IP with their main character "Thunk" as the only playable character as of NOW - in this early version

Graphics & Atmosphere

Firstly, the graphics which are in a pixel style has been carefully crafted, with some really nice color choices. There are also the small details like tree leaves moving in the wind and the layered pa
parallax scrolling backgrounds stretching into the misty forest background. The animations are also mostly very nice.

Fighting system

Even though the fighting system appears simple at first glance, it definitely has depth. At it's core it's jumping around and bashing the button for a 3-hit combo, the final blow typically slamming the opponent to the ground. And then there are the weapons that you find stashed all over the place for the taking, giving you more powerful blows if you do pick them up.

For a pre-alpha stage game, this already feels pretty polished in my opinion. But I definitely see some room for improvement too. For instance one thing that would greatly add to the satisfaction of fighting is to be able to beat the enemies when they're knocked to the ground. If you for instance look at timestamp 05:39 where I knock over the big goblin, and my ground bash doesn't appear to hurt him at all. Another thing that would be cool would be the ability to immediately turn and strike after a jump. I guess what I'm broadly asking for here are more ways and opportunities to beat the opponents to a pulp.

Items and treasure

I like how weapons and treasure are scattered all over the place. There are weapon stands with various weapons, barrels containing mostly coins, practice dummies with shields, and then there are treasure chests of course. Those are locked with keys that are typically dropped after killing the the last powerful enemy in the area. A tried and true mechanic, and I really like it.

In the treasure chests there are some special items with powerful attacks, like the "Ice Breaker" seen here (How awesome is that animation graphic?!):

I'm looking forward to see more variation in the types of items that can be found, and also increasingly powerful items as the game progresses.

On the note of powerful items (like the one depicted above) I'd also would have liked to see some more visible in-game instructions for what the item does. On my first playthrough I mostly wasted most of them as I didn't understand what they was for. I also disliked that the super powerful one-use items are in the same slot as healing pots. I wasted a bunch of those too.

Level progression

As we get deeper and deeper into the goblin camp, we start to see the landscape change as we get closer to these mysterious purple crystals. I really like this, how the level progresses and gradually changes. This makes me intrigued and want to see the next level.

Conclusion

Overall this is a very solid demo that plays really well, and even in it's current state it's well worth checking out and providing some feedback.

There are plenty of stuff that can be added, tweaked moved around and balanced, but with a foundation like this, there possibilities are many. This is what the foundation of interesting gameplay with depth looks like. If they keep building like this, I can't wait to see what's in store for this game for the future, and that's strictly talking about the gameplay. I'm possibly even more excited to see how they will implement their Non Fungible "Relics" into the mix, and to see their L1 HIVE NFTs come to fruition.

Well what are you waiting for, head over to https://www.thunkgaria.world and support these guys. They're true builders on Hive and what they're bringing to the table has some huge potential.