If you don’t know the story of Basement Brawl – which you might know better as Basement Crawl – then we’ll recap quickly. Essentially, the developer released a game which wasn’t up to scratch (it has a Metacritic score of 27) with poor design choices, boundless bugs and a plethora of problems. Instead of simply abandoning the project and moving on, they’re completely remaking it from the ground up, and renaming it Basement Brawl.
We’ve been speaking to Marc Colhoun, the chief marketing officer at Bloober, and he’s explained the reasoning for reworking the title rather than just patching it or even moving on completely. “It’s pretty easy to sit back after the release of a game and say that you didn’t know about the bugs that were there and release a patch” started Marc – that’s true, and it’s something we’ve seen plenty of that in AAA releases. “That was the position that we were in, the game was released and, on release, we were watching streamers on Twitch and we saw crashes and other issues.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wacJt6iNqtI
“It’s a pretty bad situation to be in as an indie” continued Marc, and the developers soon came to the conclusion that they would have to accept responsibility and rebuild the title. So, just how have they changed the title for the better? Naturally, they’ve fixed a lot of the bugs, but there appears to be a lot of new content in there too, based on input from people who purchased – and were disappointed by – Basement Crawl.
“A recurring theme in our feedback [was] that the mechanics of the game weren’t clear enough” says Marc, so they added “a way of explaining and teaching the mechanics to players.” They’ve doubled the number of playable characters to eight, and rather than characters simply having different stats, “each character has completely different, and unique, skill sets.”
“On top of this we added in many more game modes in the multiplayer section as well as adding in 8 single player campaigns for gamers to make their way through.” Alongside all of that, they’ve improved the AI and skill systems, and practically every part of the game, according to Marc. As you can see from the screenshots and artwork below, the visual style has also had an overhaul.
This sounds like a substantial reworking of the original game, and should hopefully be more enjoyable as a result. They’ll be releasing more information on the game modes soon, and when the game releases it’ll be available to those who purchased Basement Crawl for free. Let’s hope it’s a better game this time round – it certainly looks more promising.
Bloober Team
Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to write about our game. If anyone has any questions, we are here and listening! :)
Youles
Will keep an eye on this, I do miss a Bomberman-style game. Perhaps Share Play will also make it more appealing, as you should still be able to play with friends that don’t have it, and may even entice them to purchase it. Nice gesture to give the game to initial buyers too, hope it does well!
TSBonyman
I’m not a huge fan of this genre but i respect their decision to go back and rework the game and wish them well with the “relaunch”.
Jones81
Its pretty commendable the’re doing this, hopefully it’ll be good
Nate
Nice to see some genuine thought and effort going into this, rather than the easier option of writing off the game and moving on. I bought a copy of the original when it was on sale, with the hope that the new version will be worthwhile. Fingers crossed!