You'd think trying to make a brawler after SoR4, SoFEX, and Fight n Rage would be complete foolishness. Especially an old school arcade beat-em-up holding tightly to convention with very few nods to stylish action mechanics. But Mayhem Brawler, against all odds, pulls that off with style. The way it faithfully holds to those conventions without being totally mired in references gives the game a solid design and a strong identity. At its core, Mayhem Brawler is a proper arcade beat-em-up. Pick the fast aggressive girl, the normal dude with a killer mustache, or the big guy who grapples and pile drives, go right, punch things. You have dashes, specials, and with the recent 2.0 patch, air combos, limited juggles, and and air special too. You can't do a LOT in the air but if you're good you can really keep enemies up there for a while and it is a lot of fun to try. For defense you have a block that can also turn into a counter-attack with almost TOO lenient timing. Your run works on the Y-axis too unlike SOR which allows for lateral dodging rarely.
The big unique thing here is that Mayhem Brawler has added icons for status effects. Certain attacks or weapons can apply bleed, def down, or daze (prevents wakeup attacks). And several other genre standard states have icons too: Enemies prepping a special, temporary invulnerability, and preparing a wakeup attack (This is probably the best justification for the icon system. You know if an enemy is going to attack you instantly on wakeup because of this icon, or if it is prevented by a daze effect.). Weapons are useful in this regard because they can apply some of these states as well as generally be used for juggling with their fast hits. Enemies drop these quite often and most fights have about 3 or 4 lying around, but Mayhem generally encourages weapon use more than most brawlers.
The enemies are widely varied. Each level has a themed set of enemies, werewolves, djinn, vampires, and even the game's final levels have a couple unique enemy sets not seen anywhere else. Each enemy typically has one or two gimmicks that you have to work around. SOR4 hyper-armor style "You MUST stop and dodge this attack" does not show up here, but there are some other quirks. Some enemies will counter you instantly if you try to grab them, and this is the ONLY state that needs an icon but does not have one. Some bosses will just flat out start spamming specials out of your chains if you try to combo them without knocking them in the air. Others teleport. But, hands down, the biggest problem you have to deal with is enemies shooting at you. This is the game's one favorite, most constant trick and despite it being so ever-present it remains fun to deal with throughout the whole game and even on replays. The game is loaded with fights where cagey, cowardly enemies with guns will shoot you while two or three melee dudes threaten you. Even with your dash and special moves, the pressure these guys apply in tandem makes it hard to do anything, and you will have to work around this constantly throughout the game. If Mayhem Brawler weren't so dang good at what it does, this would be catastrophic, but Mayhem manages to pull even THIS style of fight off too.
The game lasts 45 minutes from start to finish, proper arcade length. You have a campaign mode which is just a story with saves at each level. There are 7 levels in the campaign, but at various places the campaign branches. Two of those 7 levels have different routes with completely different levels and bosses. And the final level is picked from one of three finales, each with unique enemy sets and final bosses. No continues arcade mode is unlocked after your first clear of campaign. Four difficulties, three characters, you have some good replay value if you do not mind a classic beat-em-up. Do note, though, that I find the Hard difficulty almost undertuned. I can 1cc it on Arcade Hard easily (And I am not good.), but the enemies are pretty aggressive and can steal your lives easily if you make too many mistakes. The score system is built entirely off of chains of attacks without getting hit. Unfortunately like most chain systems you either score big or whiff once and get nothing, but if you are just playing for survival you can stop attacking and let the chain time out and score for some points toward your next extend and not sweat the lost potential too much.
The art, the music, and the story are all quite good. You can just tell from the screenshots, these guys spared no expense creating this goofy comic book world. EVERYTHING cool they could think of is thrown into this setting: You got grinning djinn, you got gangster werewolves living in the ghettos, you got superpowered cops, you got untrustworthy corporate vampires, mages in hoodies pulling out magic glocks or shivs, a hot wererat crime lord lady in her underwear, there's even some apocalypse zombie shit contained in this city. And the whole writing of the game is treated as though this is a comic book setting you are joining in media res. You get a BIT of backstory if you keep up, but you just kinda gotta nod along and pick up the details as the game goes along. It's wonderfully corny and I really enjoyed it...
... except... they created a new setting, added everything cool they could... and then they added probably the worst possible thing imaginable from the real world: Social media. It's accurate social media too. The narrator character is a social media addict and people argue in the comments of her posts EXACTLY like all those awful arguments with subhumans in IRL social media. It pains me to admit it is used really well as a framing device and giving this setting a lot of crunchy depth behind the scenes of all the insane freaks you beat up. But it's still the absolute worst thing in the real world and in this game world too. One boss uses two completely random political lines copied from social media from basically opposite teams of the typical social media arguments, so the devs clearly don't mean anything bad by it, they are just copying stuff from social media. One more slight weakness is that with three different final bosses, the story really does not go anywhere. You chase a macguffin for a while, and then the macguffin is just used to make one of three arbitrary people you never met before the final boss. Half the bosses are written as though they would probably be good guys in the proper comics, if there are any comics here, and are mostly fighting you because they need a boss here, but that's all minor issues.
All that aside, and note the in-game chatter is a little too common and corny but can be disabled on future plays, Mayhem Brawler is a fine game. It stands out from the competition on Steam purely by sticking to convention, where SOR4 and FnR deviate, and strongly executing that convention while iterating on it. It is fun and easy to pick up and play and definitely earns a spot on any beat-em-up fan's shelf. There are a few quirks in the fighting engine here and there, but it remains a really strong product. I would be interested to see if anything else gets made in this setting.
