Ultra Space Battle Brawl is an older game from 2016. It's a venerable 8 years old at the time of this review. It's a handheld (Nintendo Switch)/console game that's also been put on Steam as a bit of an afterthought, as it's very much designed for the handheld/console gaming audience. The game here is an unusual hybrid of arcade fighter/versus and Breakout/Pong. Instead of a paddle, you control a player with a bat (or other percussive mechanism) and you have to hit the ball, which places it in your "mode". While the ball has come off your bat, it will damage the enemy blocks but bounce safely off yours. The enemy, of course, will try to hit the ball themselves, and thus the battle takes place. There's power ups and other special moves to add some interest to the otherwise shallow premise.
The game was never that popular, due to extremely weak technical delivery and console focus (a death sentence for many games), as well as the rather basic axiom in game development, just because an idea is novel, doesn't mean it's good.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.
Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Ultra Space Battle Brawl didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the somewhat short story mode, trivial to get, but less than 24 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 14 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Ultra Space Battle Brawl has the almost scam-like price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Far Cry 5" or "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey". No pixelcrap is worth $10. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
