LogFAQs > #967103620

#20: Storybook Brawl

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/0/9/AAA-H0AADiIB.jpg

It's amazing how some pretty good games can exist and have thousands of active players, and yet I'll just never have heard of them, because I haven't discovered it and nobody in any of my circles ever mentions it. How did everyone else stumble upon it, then? Were they all parts of other communities that did discover this game, or are they just better at finding new games to play than I am? Or is it just random chance and they stumbled upon it in a Steam queue or something? This is a problem that plagues me even now - people keep mentioning games in this topic I haven't heard of and it's like, how did I not know about this game before?

Storybook Brawl is one such game - I didn't pick it up until it became popular for a few months on one of my smaller discord servers. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have given it much of a chance if it wasn't recommended to me, because the people who played it said they were also pretty surprised by how good it was. It's got that whiff of "online free-to-play fantasy-strategy game that's trying to be the next Hearthstone or League of Legends or whatever" stench coming off of it, which kinda makes me nope out right away. Feels desperate, and I'm not really into that kind of scene - too likely to be toxic. Not my vibe.

But it IS free to play, and it WAS recommended despite it kind of looking like some boring autobattler junk, so I gave it a try, and it became my new addiction for three months.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/0/AAA-H0AADiIC.jpg

Storybook Brawl is one of those games where I have trouble categorizing the genre. It's an autobattler. Not quite a card game, since there aren't really cards; you're buying characters to put on your team, powering them up, and then they fight another person's team of characters. A game consists of 8 players, each of whom plays a main 'hero' who gives you special abilities that affect your team, and you get matched up 1v1 with other players, fighting each other, losing health if you lose a battle, getting bigger and better characters on your roster, until there's one winner.

First thing I noticed was that I wasn't giving this game's theming enough credit because it's actually pretty great. This game has a fairy-tale theme, all of its characters being drawn from old folktales or mythology in the public domain that have mostly been popularized by Disney, but the art in this game is great and gives all of the characters fun, clever twists, which make them fun to play. This game has an impressive roster of hero characters to play - again, League of Legends vibes here - but all their art is really fun and cute.

This game does have a free-to-play model, which I was highly skeptical of at first, but it's not a very scummy one, so it works out. Every game, you get four hero choices: one of the eight 'starting' heroes that everyone has, one hero from any of the other 25+ selections, and then two other heroes also from the other 25+, but you can only pick them if you own them by purchasing them with in-game currency. So even if you don't buy any heroes, you still get choices, and even if you do own a hero it doesn't mean it'll get offered in any given game, so you can't use it all the time - you'll still have to play some different heroes now and then. You can use money to get the currency you need to buy them, but you can also build it up by just playing, so there isn't really much of a need to spend money. There's actually very little reason to spend money, which might be part of the problem with their business model.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/1/AAA-H0AADiID.jpg

Anyway, despite the idea of an autobattler making it sound very un-tactical and just kind of luck-based, the strategy in this game is actually really well made. Every character has interesting and potentially very powerful abilities while still being very well balanced and team composition matters a lot. There is still a fair bit of luck of the draw involved, especially in upgrading your characters (having 3 of the same character upgrades them, powering them up and giving you an item), so that aspect can be pretty frustrating and I've gotten mad at this game for being bullshit quite a lot, but putting together good team compositions is a lot of fun. The fact that this is a competitive game really makes drafting a good team feel rewarding, because then you get to beat the crap out of some rube who didn't put together a team as good as yours (or maybe just got unluckier than you). There's enough randomness here for every game to feel different, too; there's quite a few potentially winning comps out there, although the game gets patched every month and last I played, trees were way overpowered and needed to be taken down a notch.

So I got really hooked on it. Every game takes like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, and I just get a big dopamine hit from trying to win games and watch my (stupid, completely pointless) rating go up. All the heroes play super differently so every game is new and fun and I can never resist playing just one more. I actually played so much that I managed to make the top 200 of a monthly leaderboard in rating once; I think that was mostly just luck and convenient timing, but I'm still gonna brag about it. I did the monthly tournaments for a while and never qualified in the first day, but I came pretty close at least; my abilities in this game are competitive. It's fine, I'm sure that one day, after I continue to play this game for a while and develop my skills, I'll make it out of qualifiers. I expect to enjoy this game for a nice, long while -