Ultimate Brickbattle

Brickbattle as a genre of game has been around since the inception of ROBLOX's multiplayer. It's not exactly hard to see where their dominance came from, as ROBLOX seemingly pushed it when they first added multiplayer to ROBLOX way back in mid 2006. Proving to be a popular format with its terrain destructibility nearly unmatched with anything in the AAA industry, the brick battle genre of games lasted a extensive period of time, waning off in the new fag era and finally fading into obsecurity with the advent of the Nu-blox era, with a notable exception of Doomspire Brickbattle. Despite its waning popularity over the years, there have been a fair share of good new games that take advantage of this once staple genre of games, and this review is aimed at one particularly interesting one.

The game of this review is Ultimate Brick Battle, made by a ROBLOXian named EkoGam3. The description of the game opens up with some flavor text. "The name of the game hasn't changed... blox or be bloxxed. Kill and destroy everything!" This flavor text really puts me back into the 2010s, when pretty much every game had this sort of text to entice you. The game advertises tickets(an ingame currency), a safety mode so that you can destroy bits of the map in peace, and a "game changing event" every 5 minutes. Although it isn't listed, what makes this brick battle game unique is the fact that also swaps game pieces out every minute or so, which I will get into during the gameplay section. The thumbnails themselves advertise low gravity scenarios, the ability to become a fire wielder, map inundation, skating, surviving, swinging, and the catch phrase, "blox or be bloxxed." Outside of the Jojo reference(which isn't even that bad), the thumbnails do a great job at advertising the game, at least in my opinion.

Once you load in, the game puts you outside of the battle arena, on an island. It is here where you can get your first badge. Simply accept a death by jumping onto this slide, and then die out of bounds. It gives you the badge Take a Dip. You can find an update log, a scoreboard for the top 100 players, and a credits section on the wall outside of the battle arena, next to spawn. There's not a whole lot you can do in this spawn area outside of that, unfortunately. When you are ready to enter the arena, you can either walk into a shiny brick that says "Enter Battle Box", or hit the "To Battle Box" button on your UI. Something to note is that the game will provide you music. You can customize the playlist, but at the current moment it seems to exclusively load up pre-user audio music files. This might prove to be very nostalgic, when in combination with the replaced sound effects the game already provides. Yes, the game even replaces jumping, zooming and landing sound effects to their classic versions, and on top of that, restores the old style solar flare that used to appear in the camera of older versions of ROBLOX.

The arena itself is probably the most interesting bit about this game. As explained before, the game has a unique mechanic to it that pertains to the map itself. The map is divided into a 3x3 section, of which 9 different, loosely chronologically related builds exist. One of the two most unique parts of this game is that, instead of a simple regen script which would be in most brick battle games, this game instead removes one of the 3x3 squares, and then replaces them with a brand new build, either inspired or directly taken from another game pre-2013. This gives the arena incredible levels of diversity, all the while remaining familiar but fresh. I don't have an exact number on how many things it can replace with, but I know it must at least be 34, since that's how many I've seen. It appears to run this routine roughly once a minute, and picks which square by random, so certain destroyed sections may remain on the map for nearly an hour before anything happens to it. This also makes sure that you don't get bored blowing up the same four corners of Crossroads, which may occur after many years of playing the same map.

The arena will also have an event every 5 minutes. This is a number of things, although the ones I experienced while reviewing were killbots, water flooding, zombie survival, regular fog, and becoming a designated fire wielder. Being the fire wielder is probably the most amount of fun. You're given 2 new weapons to use, the balefire and the hellfire. Hellfire acts somewhat like a bomb. You charge it up for a short bit, and then you have several explosions occur around you, causing immense damage. Balefire is a string of explosives that act a bit like a railgun, penetrating through buildings and causing severe damage over a line rather than in an AoE. The water flooding was probably the buggiest, seeing as the collision of the building I was in went haywire and sent me flying out of the arena and to my death. It has a lot of potential, but if it occurs, you should try to avoid being in any interiors, especially of structures that had just collapsed or toppled. By far, my least favorite was the killbots. Killbots have far too much health, they're moving targets in the air, and they constantly fire rockets at you. Although a direct hit from a rocket would instantly kill it, it is not easy to kill them. Probably the biggest problem of them is that not only can they kill you after you respawn with a force field on, but killing them doesn't net you a kill. This means that you accrue deaths, which can easily completely wreck your K:D ratio. All of these scenarios last for about a minute, which means that you can quickly return to your regularly scheduled brick battle after working with or against eachother in this temporary shakeup.

In the arena, you have a fairly decent selection of weapons, all pretty standard for a good brick battle. You have the classic linked sword, the unforgettable slingshot, the nice rocket launcher, the trowel that can assemble walls for you, the destructive bomb, the completely forgettable super balls, a paintball gun, and rocket boots. Anyone who is a fan of brick battle already knows these weapons, but it is probably best to go over them anyways. The linked sword is your typical melee attack, which can be used to occasionally temporarily float in the air for extra mobility, with some luck. The slingshot itself is a pretty boring quick firing ranged option, it has a bit of an arc though, so a good player can hit someone behind a wall with it. The rocket launcher fires a quick moving rocket, but can easily be thwarted by a wall and is too slow to be used reliably up close. Similarly, the bomb fulfills the same, slow destructive role of the rocket launcher, but isn't ranged. The super balls, which I'm not sure function properly since I can't test them, knock players over, temporarily stunning them. They are highly unpredictable and bouncy, though, so it is a very risky gamble if it does work properly. Unfortunately, most brick battles seem to not have this working. The paintball gun is a different, similarly fast firing option. Its most unique attribute, being able to paint bricks different colors, is fully functional and like always, is still 100% a funny cosmetic thing. Iit is still a decent ranged weapon that has a lot less annoying arc than the slingshot, but for some reason still likes to bounce at least once. Finally, the rocket boots themselves aren't weapons, but rather an incredibly useful mobility tool. Simply click to gain vertical momentum, and hold click or switch to a weapon to keep the vertical moentum going. It does eventually run out, but it does provide a lot of mobility despite this limitation.

As mentioned before, there is an ingame currency known as tickets. You earn this currency either by destroying the environment using explosives, or by logging in once a day for 10 tix. The store has a variety of things, ranging from purely cosmetic, to actually useful tools. Cosmetics, such as fire auras, or diferent explosion effects, can be bought for as cheap as 5 thousand tix, or as much as 100,000 tix. The most expensive item is the Ghost Walker, a sword you can buy for 300,000 tix. You can also buy Tix in increments of 10^4 to 10^7 with Robux. 10 Robux nets you 10,000 Tix, while 7000 Robux gets you a whooping 10,000,000 Tix. Personally, I see this as a bit of a copout, so how about you don't go buying tickets? You can also your daily bonus to 100 tix for 200 Robux. I'm a poor fag, so I can't afford any of this. There's also emotes you can buy for 299 Robux, and donation buttons too. VIP and Custom Music is touted to be coming soon.

Overall, this game is an enjoyable experience that feels like it has plenty of replayability. Although aimed specifically at a multiplayer experience, it's still fun to walk around the map to just explore it, and its ever shifting design provides plenty of fun if you just wish to destroy things. The weapon selection is pretty good too, although I somewhat wish that all of the weapons were obtainable, even just temporarily for as long as you're connected, from the map itself. I rate this game 8/10. A very enjoyable experience, but it needs a bit of tweaking, especially with the killbots and the store.

Well, that's the first review out of the way. I wanted to close off with a few notes that are very loosely related. The first of the bunch is that at the time of writing this, I have 1 applicant. He actually applied last night, which I wasn't expecting to occur. Even better, his 12 sentence test review actually struck deep into my original fag core. Even a close friend of mine, who had given up on ROBLOX years ago due to how bad the situation had gotten, actually felt like he wanted to play ROBLOX again after that review. I won't bore you with the details, but unless there's some REALLY good competition, he'll definitely make the list of workers by October. The next of the group is that I wanted to admit that an RS Sports review is in the works, however I had temporarily given up as I was miserable at the tutorial and couldn't quite figure out how to queue games up with my limited time. It's in the backlog for now, and should be able to be done next week. Finally, I just wanted to go over my short intro. I don't know if I should have had it that short or not. Next time, it will be excessively long, but I do want some input to see whether you like the longer remarks or just the short remarks before going into the actual review.