Brawl Stars is bite-sized fun that strips away too much to be great

Supercell’s follow up to Clash Royale and Clash of Clans has issues

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Why you can trust SCMP

This is the base-attacking mode which resembles the traditional MOBA games. (Picture: TapTap)

Josh Ye

Published: 4:16pm, 17 Dec 2018Updated: 8:48am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

After three years, Supercell -- the company that brought us Clash Royale and Clash of Clans -- finally released its fifth mobile title, Brawl Stars.

It’s almost a minimalist version of what a MOBA can be. But while it got rid of all the excessive bits that I hate about today’s mobile games, it ends up leaving me wanting more.

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Brawl Stars, which Supercell tested through a soft-launch for over 500 days, is similar to Arena of Valor. But if you think Arena of Valor is a stripped-down version of League of Legends, Brawl Stars is even more so; a MOBA game with only the most bare-bone essentials.

Instead of destroying turrets in three different lanes, you collect gems. Its default game mode, Gem Grab, is a 3v3 team battle in which both sides compete to collect gems sprung by a well in the center of the map. The team managing to hold 10 gems for 15 seconds wins the game.

As you can tell from this clip, the game looks amazing and it feels silky smooth (although it did crash on me once). Most importantly, it avoids what I consider as the biggest sin of mobile games nowadays (especially the Chinese ones) -- it doesn’t cram itself full of different systems.