Come in skeptical as you want. But I’ll come out and say it straight away. Pewdiepie: Legend of the Brofist is a solid platformer. Outerminds Inc. have done an exceedingly good job on this game.
As soon as you start the game, you’re thrown right into the mix of things. Pewdiepie finishes his recording and finds out his fans have gone missing. Suddenly, he’s attacked by an army of Barrels. He’s informed by the Barrel King that all his fans have been kidnapped by the king and is using them to obtain the ‘Legendary Brofist’. This prompts him to go on a journey to save them, as well as various YouTuber friends. Yeah the story is just plain silly. This game’s very whacky dialogue and voice acting isn’t exactly mind blowing. The story alone is really just simple fan pandering which is totally fine considering the subject of the game.
Now with that aside, let’s talk about what’s actually good about this title: The gameplay, the music and the pixel animation.
Legend of the Brofist is a platformer/arcade hybrid with a lot of detail and unlockables as you progress through the levels. Each level comprises of enemies, coins, hearts, a pink er… pig-squid camera and piles of rubble you can rummage through to pick up more coins or patches of the various sprites and characters pertaining to the game. You’ll want to collect lots of coins as you progress through the levels in order to purchase new characters, skills and upgrades. Each character is either a YouTuber or a some sort of creature affiliated with the Pewdiepie lore; this includes Markiplier, ChaoticMonki, JackSepticEye and CinnamonToastKen. You can allocate some of your coins into upgrading these characters to have more hearts and thereby being able to take more hits. As you ramp up the difficulty of levels, being able to take more hits is incredibly useful.
Finally, the skills you purchase come in two flavors that help out during a level: Offensive and defensive. Offensive abilities help in both attacking enemies on screen and defending against incoming attacks. These abilities include Stephano’s scimitars, Bro drones and special character specific abilities like Ken’s Bear Hat fusion. The defensive abilities include Dr. Crab healing, Energy shield and again, character specific abilities like Markiplier’s Pink Mustache that allows him to double jump. These abilities are on a charge cooldown which build up as you collect coins and kill enemies during a stage.
The pixel animation is extremely fluid, more that I expected it to be. In a way, it’s also a flaw. Especially with how they’ve programmed the jumping mechanic for the game. Personally, I find having a slide on landing, no matter how slight it is, in a platforming game is not user friendly. It creates problems with precision jumping, something that is extremely important when it comes to a platformer that requires a certain amount of precise jumping. Fortunately as mentioned, the slide is only slight. The only real issue I had was on an ice level with an obvious icy platform that creates a great deal of sliding. However, it’s obvious the team had this thought in mind and so precision jumping isn’t emphasized too much in these levels. There is however something I disliked that tied into the sliding issue. Rummaging through rubble is done by standing still next to it, with the excess amount of sliding, that was met with some difficulty. Turns out, it is difficult to stop sliding and stand still to go through the pile of rubble while being time pressed.
The chiptune is cute and charming to say the least, it does get jarring if you have to repeat levels over and over again, especially as it reloads the tune when you restart levels. Otherwise, not much to say other than well done to the music team. The melodies work well with the various themed levels and it’s always nice to hear pleasant chiptune music that doesn’t grate your mind after excessive runs of the same level over and over.
Pewdiepie: Legend of the Brofist was released on mobile on September 24th, 2015. The port is completely serviceable and works well on PC; both for controller and keyboard. Since its release, the game has released free small updates that adds extra levels for seasonal events including Halloween and Christmas levels. These levels, when completed, unlock special costumes for all the playable characters. The game has heart. Whether you’re a fan of Pewdiepie or not, it doesn’t hinder the fact that this game is a fun platforming game with a fair bit of replayability and unlockables. Whether it’s worth a purchase? For roughly 8 USD, it’s worth it.