Free weekend for Nick All Star Brawl 2 is over.

Conclusion: the game still fucking sucks. It has a very good foundation, but the amount of soft locks I experienced was so high that it is baffling this is still an issue 3 months after release. Meanwhile they are developing and releasing overpriced DLC characters. Sometimes the ledges seem broken, and I've noticed several times people just clipping through the stage halfway which affects their hitboxes and hurt boxes, naturally. The graphics are also still scuffed as hell. Better than the first one I guess? The anti-aliasing may as well not exist though and there are no advanced graphics settings to speak of, just a preset toggle and I honestly can't tell what it does besides making everything look just... shittier. It's hard to explain.

Most of the characters also have some extreme jank to them. Stuff like moves that can kill ridiculously early, extremely good frame data, or long range moves that dominate the stage (some of which you can't dodge, you just have to hope they don't aim correctly). Of course, I picked Ember to play as which seems to generally be one of, if not the worst character in the game, so these problems were exacerbated tenfold. I could feel how bad she was in comparison but for just a few days you can't exactly experiment with a bunch of characters in depth.

There's little to not direction influence (DI) so you get trapped in combos very easily.

The slime mechanic is cool in theory. In theory. The hitboxes on the ultimate moves have no signs of where they actually are so you end up missing A LOT. I don't know if it's every character, but at least Ember's ultimate move has some start-up lag to it even though the animation is going... so you can realistically react to it and shield without getting hit. The only way I could reliably get it to work is if I tried to disjoint it right in front of another character's attack. It just felt super inconsistent.

The other things you can use slime for, to my knowledge at least, are cancelling endlag and cancelling knockback. The endlag one is more or less pointless, because fast moves in the game are so fast it isn't even necessary and slow moves have so much knockback that you can't cancel it to follow up with anything. The knockback cancelling is super fucked up because it doesn't seem like a cool mechanic, it just feels like cheating. If I get a super good read with my slow ass character and knock someone to the blast zone, then they can just cancel it and come back to stage again with their broken ass recovery? Yeah that's fucking lame.

In a word, that's how I would describe the game. Lame. If your character isn't broken-lame, you have to play lame to win. If you're playing lame and manage to do that for long enough, your opponent can just do something lame like knockback canceling to make your lame playing null and void. The game itself has very lame coding. The monetization especially is incredibly lame. Even the ranked mode is lame, because it features no stage banning or counterpicking like a real ranked mode ought to have. If you click rematch at the end of a set it'll literally run back the last game you played instead of going back to stage select... like who the fuck was calling all the shots for this game? Who the fuck designed these move sets that made extremely powerful ranged moves that just have a bit more endlag (in the best case scenario)? Somebody who is lame, probably.

It really goes to show that like, I'd rather play Super Smash Bros. 64 than this. I'd rather play Brawl. Have we learned nothing from decades of platformer fighters? I feel like NASB is trying to be different and stand out but they don't know how to actually balance something that is different. That, combined with extremely poor monetization and really taking advantage of customers with the fact that this game even exists in the first place means it was always doomed to fail. The only people who will keep playing this are probably children and groomers.