Brawl Busters: An upcoming fantastic no-holds barred class-based beat-down

Grab your electric guitar, your football helmet, baseball bat, fire hose, or boxing gloves: Brawl Busters is on its way from Rock Hippo Productions and Weezor! In this smash action title, the production house that brought us MicroVolts will bring us a brawl-action combat free-to-play MMO game that will operate from the third-person-shooter angle bring a little bit of Team Fortress to a wacky class system of brawlers. Developed by SkeinGlobe, Brawl Busters has a look and feel reminiscent of MicroVolts but the gameplay diverges from there.

Why should you know about this? Because the closed beta test is coming August 11th and you won’t want to miss it.

The game introduces a class system similar to Team Fortress as each player will have access to only one of each classification of fighter; but will be able to level, outfit, customize, and enhance them individually. Accessible through the player’s locker, we’ll be able to choose between five classes, called Busters: Firefighter, Rocker, Boxer, Blitzer, and Slugger.

Firefighters are a slow-moving, high HP character who use a defensive shield to protect themselves and firefighter themed attacks such as a hose. The Rocker totes an electric guitar with her and acts as an all-around-fighter with attacks that work from short to long range. The Boxer is a speedy short-ranged melee fighter who pummels his enemies into the dirt using hit-and-run tactics; high-speed on the offensive. The Blitzer is a charging football player wearing scrum armor and a helmet, he has high hit points and carries a football, a melee fighter with extensive loiter time endurance. Finally, there’s the Slugger who comes equipped with a bat and acts as a long-range fighter swinging her bat to sling baseballs great distances.

Rock Hippo has designed the maps so that the environments are highly interactive. Some objects in the game will be destructible and others will provide interesting effects. For example, phone booths will be able to teleport characters and fire-hydrants will act as boost jumps.

All of the buster classes work well in tandem with teammates and are designed so that teams of busters can work together to cover each others weaknesses with their strengths. There will be a nice variety of gameplay modes including the usual free-for-all and team deathmatch. However, Brawl Busters adds a PvP mode called “Glow Rush” where all characters have a particular radioactive substance called Glow and fight one another to gain it; when a player is downed, their Glow transfers to the victor until only one remains. Presumably, as a character gains more Glow the brighter they’ll shine.

Finally, there will also be a PvE cooperative Zombie Survival mode added that will pit teams of characters against zombie hordes. The zombies will have their own classes (undead firemen, undead police officers, etc.) that will have their own weaknesses and strengths that will require well built teams and good communication to survive.

Costume items will be available to update player cosmetics and customizations can be made to each of the busters. In fact, characters are not gender or body locked, meaning that male/female and 10 different body types can be chosen for each buster. The microtransactions cash-shop will have weapons and buff items available; however, items that provide in-game effects will always be comparable to items that can be bought for experience.

Cash-exclusive items in the microtransaction shop will be limited to cosmetic costume items only.

Aside from cosmetics, buster weapons can also be modified. Each weapon has a primary, secondary, and special attack. However, some special items can upgrade weapons to change their attack types.

Once the closed beta kicks off, people who join will receive a special badge that conveys a title, “Original Buster” which will provide some exclusive items and other benefits.

Also, for anyone who happens to be attending, Brawl Busters will be featured at Gamescon in Germany. At which there will be a Zombie Survival tournament. The tournament winner will receive a custom Alienware keyboard.