And again, I would have been able to forgive the game for some of this, had the level of challenge been good and interesting. At least I could flail around in a room with my partner and feel that we were facing adversity together! But no, the challenge curve in Brut@l is exceedingly strange. There was very little chance of dying from traps or enemies, but one misstep from platforming resulted in a death. Unlike when a player simply dies from running out of health, when a player dies from falling, their body ends up back at the start of the level and their partner needs to trek all the way back to resurrect them. This juxtaposition of quite easy combat to instant falling death made the pacing feel very off.
The last sticking point, for me, concerns the look of the game. After playing for a while, it began to hurt my eyes. It wasn’t the white-on-black coloring or even the environment. It was the characters themselves; 3D shadowy models with characters stuck onto them in clever ways to make up their features. As still pictures, I like how they look. In motion, they resulted in eye fatigue. And that’s a real drag because, as I said, I really like the aesthetic of the game. For me, it’s the biggest thing the game has going for it, but in the end I probably would have preferred something more generic to save myself the eye strain. The aesthetic makes it stand out from the crowd, but that’s really the only thing that makes it stand out. That doesn’t feel like enough, especially when some players may find it to be functionally uncomfortable.
Even with a number of drawbacks, Brut@l isn’t game that I would classify as “awful.” As I said in my opening paragraph, there’s nothing broken about the game, or even unjustifiably frustrating (provided you can handle rogue-likes and all that entails). It’s just that at the end of the day Brut@l is a very vanilla rogue-like in a time period where gamers are bombarded with rogue-likes and rogue-lites. The co-op in Brut@l doesn’t offer anything especially interesting, either. The biggest thing co-op brings to the table is resurrection, but when the a player has to resurrect a player after a falling death, it's really more of an annoyance than a positive feature. I’m sure there are gamers out there that will like what Brut@l has to offer, but I can’t count myself as one of them.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Share the adventure by exploring Brut@l’s dungeon with a friend in local co-op, lay waste to the hordes of enemies that stand between you and floor 26, and evoke the nostalgia of all night gaming sessions from years past.
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.