The Game Review You’ve Been Waiting For: A Breakdown of Brawl Stars

I'm willing to bet that everywhere and anywhere you go these days, you are sure to see someone glued to their tiny telephone screen, fully zeroing into their high stakes Brawl Stars match. More popular than it has ever been before, Brawl Stars has without doubt taken the world of gaming by storm, surpassing the level of its peak throughout late 2023 and early 2024. Whether you’ve been an experienced player for a while now, or perhaps you’ve been thinking about making your debut as a novice, I hope that this breakdown of Brawl Stars will give you a better understanding of what the game is all about. 

“Three Brawl Stars Characters In Dynamic Combat Poses With Weapons Drawn, Amidst An Explosion, With The Game's Logo Prominently Displayed” by Brawl Stars. 

Brawl Stars is a third-person, top-down shooter game in which players can battle it out with and against other players in fun and fast paced matches, taking place in unique battle arenas, each designed with different assets and obstacles. Brawl Stars offer a selection of various different game modes, each with different objectives and different ways to play. 

Early on in the game, players can unlock Starr Drops, the main item that can give players random rewards. Players can unlock and change the rarity of Starr Drops from tapping them repeatedly. There’s a plethora of rewards that players can earn from Starr Drops, including in-game currencies (coins, credits, bling, and gems), items to express yourself on the battlefield (brawler skins, icons, pins, and sprays), power-ups to advance your brawler’s capabilities even further (star powers, gadgets, and hypercharges), and more. On rare occasions, some players can get really lucky, and end up unlocking brawlers from them. Brawl Stars has over 80 brawlers and counting, with each belonging to a different rarity, and each having their own stats, traits, and abilities, including an attack and a chargeable super attack. 

Photo via Brawl Stars.

A much easier, and guaranteed way to obtain brawlers is by way of the Starr Road, a progression path in which players can pick available brawlers to unlock by collecting enough credits. In addition to the Starr Road regarding progression paths, there is also a Trophy Road, in which players can earn rewards for reaching trophy milestones, a seasonal Brawl Pass where players can unlock awards by gaining XP from winning their matches and completing quests, and Mastery for individual brawlers, a system in which players can earn rewards by reaching individual brawler ranks points with mastery points obtained from victorious battles.