Instead, their names are buried in an Extras menu that details their different move sets. The announcer calls them out when you make a selection, but as someone in their late 20’s who isn’t familiar with the more recent fighters, there’s no way for me to identify them. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s character selection screen doesn’t present any of the characters’ names as you choose them. For a game that celebrates a cartoon network’s (note the lowercase there) storied history, it doesn’t do anything to actually communicate the origins of its 20 characters or the stages they fight on. One set of cards replaces the last until you reach the character select screen, which highlights some of the oddities in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s presentation. Each is adorned with a random character doing an action pose, but there’s never any dynamic shift from one screen to another.

Getting to the fights between SpongeBob and Reptar requires moving from one static set of cards to another, while some generic light shines bright in the background. The game’s menus are communicative, they’ll guide you where you need to go, but they’re also a near lifeless representation of fighters who were once brimming with character and personality in their original cartoons. Generally, video game menus are immaterial to a game’s actual quality (though great ones like Persona 5’s capture its style and substance more succinctly than any other isolated mechanic), but the blandness of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl’s menus embodies a lot of the game’s larger problems. players, I’ve instead fixated on one aspect that sums up my feelings on the game as a whole: the menus. While explaining what makes Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl unremarkable in a mechanical sense will likely only interest the most hardcore of Smash Bros. and (yes) PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

It does a lot of fun, silly things to make characters who were clearly never meant to be combatants face off against one another, but it also does the bare minimum as it emulates better games like Super Smash Bros. I don’t think it’s terrible, but I don’t think it’s good. I’ve been having a bit of trouble articulating my feelings on Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl.

All that nickelodeon staff