Brutal - The New Challenges

Brutal - The New Challenges by BrutalMoon is an arcade-style action game made in RPG Maker 2003 and a follow-up game to its predecessor Brutal's Challenge DeluXe. The base premise of the series hasn't changed: Playing as one of four characters, you navigate your way through dozens of challenge maps where you dodge formations of enemies in order to advance to the next stage. Though this concept is obviously neither new nor inherently complex, this game offers a considerable amount of levels that put an interesting spin on it or are just plain and simple fun, but also contains parts or aspects that execute the idea poorly.

While marked as completed, Brutal - The New Challenges was actually never fully finished. Although the available download contains quite a lot of playable content, at certain points the game simply ends and was never developed all the way.

What is there for you to play, however, is a pretty solid collection of action-focused dodging challenges, many of which require a bit of planning and sometimes even contain puzzle elements. There are two entirely separate sets of levels to tackle, depending on which character you select, and each path with its multiple theme-based worlds contains many different creative approaches towards the game's main mechanic. Different sets and combinations of enemies and obstacles with individual movement patterns and abilities ensure that the premise of the game doesn't lose its appeal even after a large number of levels.







Graphics-wise, just like its predecessor the game is a hodgepodge of many different artstyles that is supposedly intended to remind the player of the early era of indie games and homebrewed titles. Still, by today's standards, the sometimes extremely jarringly clashing quality of the graphics and weird approach to mapping are undeniable, not to mention that this sometimes makes it hard to see which parts of certain levels serve what function.

The music for this game was all custom-made by the creator, and there definitely is some pretty great stuff among the soundtrack. Just for the songs that never got to actually be used in the game, it's a pity the project is unfinished, and I'd definitely recommend taking a peek inside the BGM folder.

Unfortunately, a lot of the promising material is counterbalanced by design decisions that were quite obviously not thought through very well, implemented without consideration for how they affect the player's experience, or were clearly added as an afterthought somewhere during development without the previously created content being adjusted to account for them.
For instance, there is a so-called Quickdash mechanic that lets you move forward two steps almost instantly. Spamming this ability is prevented by a one second cooldown. The problem is that this ability makes a lot of early challenges - those that involve getting past a single enemy or obstacle - absolutely trivial. And what's worse, if you move right into an enemy using the quickdash, you just stop in front of them and remain unharmed (unless they then move further towards you, of course), making it the objectively safest way to overcome a lot of challenges. At the same time, the ability is less than helpful for many obstacles that consist of multiple enemies, since combining it with normal movement and still ending up on the exact spot you wanted to go proves to be very tricky.







In addition, the difficulty level of the game ramps up quite quickly to the point where almost pixel-precise movement and lightning reflexes are required in order to get past some of the obstacles. For players who aren't familiar with the somewhat weird way RPG Maker handles collision detection and hitboxes, many of the later levels will be practically impossible to beat. But even seasoned RPG Maker players seem to be expected to execute a lot of the challenges absolutely perfectly, with little to no room for error.







What makes this matter more annoying is the fact that the game constantly seems to rub into your face that you're supposed to be doing better. There are bonuses for beating a level especially quickly or without dying, and you are given a grade based on your performance at the end of each world. Also, upon starting a new game, you get the option of playing with a limited number of lives instead of infinite tries. My tip: Play without lives and ignore the bonus stuff, especially on your first attempt. For considering the difficulty, the occasional lack of explanations regarding certain game mechanics, and the fact that some levels practically require some trial and error before becoming solvable if you haven't played them before, there simply is no way you aren't going to die a lot. It's pretty much a part of the game. Which wouldn't even be so bad if the game took it into account.







There definitely is a place for hardcore-difficulty action games like this, as one can see from the success of titles such as Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, or Celeste. But while those games acknowledge that players will need many tries to overcome their challenges and every death is just a step closer to finally learning the way to getting it right, Brutal - The New Challenges seems to try to make you feel bad for it. Don't fall for that, and the game becomes much less frustrating.

All in all, it's clear that Brutal - The New Challenges tries to improve on many aspects of its predecessor, and succeeds sometimes. But at the same time, it still falls into many of the old pitfalls, especially the problem of failing to account for the fact that new players do not know the workings of the game and cannot read the creator's mind. The sudden ends of both level paths aren't the only thing that feels somewhat rushed or unfinished about this project, even though a lot of potential is definitely there. I still appreciate the series and this game for what it tried to accomplish, and there's a good amount of solid content in this project to make giving it a try worthwhile. But in the end, a premise that appeals to me is not enough to compensate for the design flaws that prevent this game from being as good as it could have been.