Pocket Bravery, an indie 2D fighting game by Statera Studios featuring unique characters, smooth animations, and rollback netcode is out! Read on and see if its unique mechanics are worth your while!
Pocket Bravery Review Overview
Pocket Bravery Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Comprehensive Tutorial Satisfying Combos to Learn and Execute Great Retro Feel and Look |
Story Is Text Heavy and May Feel Difficult Online Experience May Vary Fairly Steep Learning Curve |
Pocket Bravery Overall - 68/100
Pocket Bravery is a fighting game that is made by passionate people who certainly love the genre. While some of its aspects are a bit of a miss, this game is most definitely a good entry for new players who want to play a fighting game, especially with a lower price point.
Pocket Bravery Story - 6/10
The story itself is passable as a classic cliché of revenge, self-realization, and acceptance, fully completing the hero’s journey. However, the text heavy dialogue and the inability to skip the comic book style cutscenes make the pacing and overall experience slower than it has to be.
Pocket Bravery Gameplay - 7/10
The gameplay is inspired by classic fighting games, which is evident in the multiple game modes and how it plays. Unfortunately, the game sits in this confusing area between being too easy to pick up for more experienced fighting game players and too difficult for players newer to the genre. It’s not quite beginner friendly due to having stricter execution checks for some of the characters.
Pocket Bravery Visuals - 7/10
The visuals of the game feature NEO GEO Pocket inspired graphics that definitely pops, but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. While the animations and stage designs are great and smooth compared to other older fighters, it may turn some people off with their character design. Specifically, it follows a kind of chibi-style, where the heads of the characters are larger than most of their bodies. With 16-bit pixelated models and cartoonish graphics, not everyone would like this kind of artstyle.
Pocket Bravery Audio - 6/10
The game features passable sound design overall and its own original soundtrack, but their original music lacks the extra oomph to make them unforgettable tracks. The game’s sound effects with hits, blocks, special moves, and ultimate attacks are serviceable but nothing too special to note.
Pocket Bravery Value for Money - 8/10
Pocket Bravery has a fairly low price point with all the game modes it offers, making it very affordable. However, it may be hard to justify the purchase if you are not in a popular region to match for online multiplayer. It also has to compete with older fighting games with the same price point, like Granblue Fantasy: Versus at $20 and even Tekken 7 which goes on sale often, going as low as $15 for the base game.
Pocket Bravery Review: Callback to Classic Fighting Games
Pocket Bravery is a good fighting game, especially if you get others to play it with you either local multiplayer or online. If you’re planning to play solo, though, the game might get stale fast. It has every classic fighting game mechanic available, namely from EX moves with “E-Cancels” or “Elemental Cancels”, Super Cancels with “S-Cancels”, and Dash Cancels. These mechanics are used with a cost of different resources to enhance special moves to do more damage, add offensive pressure, and extend combos. But while the fighting feels great, it also suffers from the problem these classics face: finding other people to play with, especially those interested in a niche genre and title.
The game, nonetheless, is a breath of fresh air for people accustomed to older fighting games, like myself. I’m familiar with a lot of these mechanics already, so I feel right at home playing it. The uniqueness of the characters and the game’s aesthetic brings a certain charm which makes you appreciate the fact that there are people who love the genre and are willing to share the experience with newer players and keep it going.
While I would still recommend the more popular ones as a starting point for fighting games, Pocket Bravery is a definite steal at its retail price. The game can introduce players to fighting game mechanics and jargon at a cheaper price than the popular ones today.
Pros of Pocket Bravery
| Things Pocket Bravery Got Right |
|---|
|
Comprehensive Tutorial Satisfying Combos to Learn and Execute Great Retro Feel and Look |
Comprehensive Tutorial
Classic fighting games do not teach you how to play and will often throw you straight into battle or just let you go into practice mode without any idea of how the mechanics work. Pocket Bravery, while inspired by those very games, luckily features a tutorial that teaches the basics of its fighting, all the way down to the game’s unique mechanics of different cancels, elemental gauges, and the rest.
The game lets you test these mechanics one-by-one, with an accompanying explanation for each exercise. The player can follow along as well as learn, all by going through its tutorials. The game explains its mechanics very clearly, and even shows how to maximize their usage.
Satisfying Combos to Learn and Execute
The game includes Combo Trials as a game mode. Reminiscent to older fighting games, this is a mode to challenge as well as teach the player each character’s combo routes. You can mix together beginner level combos as well as more difficult combos that integrate the game’s own unique mechanics to have longer and more damaging combos.
Using the game’s features of "S-Cancels," "E-Cancels," and Dash Cancels make it satisfying to hit long combos as well as learn them from the game’s Combo Trial mode and its very own Combo Factory mode where you can practice pre-made combos, set your own combos, and even play at different speeds to get the timing right.
Great Retro Look and Feel
Statera Studio described their graphics having the "Neo Geo Pocket" aesthetic and I couldn’t agree more with their statement. The art direction that they took would definitely take you back to classics like King of Fighters R-2, Pocket Fighter, and Fatal Fury First Contact. As the game has an 16-bit aesthetic, its animations are no slouch either as the game features smooth transitions for Super Special Moves, as well as animated cut-ins for "Final Attacks"
Characters are also visually distinct from one another as they differentiate themselves from each other with their special "Ichor Elements" and their own color schemes. Each character is so unique, having their own identities in either playstyle or aesthetic, that it's hard to not gravitate towards a single character. The Story Mode also has stylish graphics with cutscenes that look and feel like a comic book style visual novel, something that can be attributed to their distinct artstyle.
Cons of Pocket Bravery
| Things That Pocket Bravery Can Improve |
|---|
|
Story Is Text Heavy and May Feel Difficult Online Experience May Vary Fairly Steep Learning Curve |
Story Is Text Heavy and May Feel Difficult
Pocket Bravery’s Story Mode follows the straightforward storyline of Nuno Alves’ revenge on one of the villains, Hector Silva, in his story of acceptance and repentance for his past actions. Although the story functions as a small tutorial to new players, with the plot device of other characters teaching Nuno how to control his Ichor, there are a lot of moves that are inaccessible till the latter half of the story. There are also certain parts of the story that feel unfair, like soldiers in the background throwing projectiles while having to face multiple opponents, with certain enemies having higher health.
There are multiple character stories in the game’s story mode, but they all suffer the same fate: the story feels a bit sluggish and there is no Skip button for the stylized cut-ins. I mentioned above that the story mode is stylized so that the scenes look like a comic. and admittedly they look great. But all of that is brought down by the slow pacing, making it a bit time consuming to watch.
Online Experience May Vary
Pocket Bravery features "rollback netcode" for its online matches, something that should give the player a smooth online experience. But since I’ve only been able to match with South American players, a region that’s significantly farther, my experience has been laggy. The online experience would be much better if there was a bigger scene of players in your local region, or at least somewhere a bit closer than South America.
Fairly Steep Learning Curve
While the tutorial of Pocket Bravery is comprehensive, it doesn’t feature character-specific tutorials to learn more of the character themselves. This can make it daunting for new players to just pick the character that they like. Every character in the game is unique and so not being able to list down the character’s strengths and weaknesses would leave a player having to brute force their way to learn a certain character on his/her own.
The "Accessible" control scheme available to the player may actually limit them, since it takes away some versions of Special moves and adds an additional button to press to access these moves. While this is not exclusive to Pocket Bravery, recent fighting games have alleviated the steep learning curve by adding resources into the game to learn from. Having these certain accessibility options can help a player through learning the game.
Is Pocket Bravery Worth It?
Definitely - If You're In A Populated Server
Pocket Bravery suffers from a symptom many fighting games suffer: lacking a local scene for that specific fighting game. Being both a niche genre and an indie fighting game, it may be hard to find a local scene and enjoy the experience of a fighting game alone. If you are able to convince some of your friends to get the game with you, then being able to practice and battle each other would make the game a worthwhile purchase. It helps that the price point isn’t as high as the more popular fighting games out there as well.
On the other hand, if you are in a region that definitely has a local scene, then it should be worth it to buy the game to try out the online mode and start ranking up from there.
Pocket Bravery Overview & Premise
A strange phenomenon has happened around the world, but only a few people are able to feel and manifest this energy called the Ichor. There are those who are able to throw energy through their hands, some are able to use the energy to reinforce their bodies, and a select few are able to transfer their essence to objects and weapons. Matilha, a criminal organization, wants to steal ancient artifacts and relics, throwing several nations and notable individuals into the fray. Follow each character’s story as they try to discover the mystery of the Ichor in their own way.
Game8 Reviews
Pocket Bravery Product Information
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|
| Title | Pocket Bravery |
|---|---|
| Release Date | August 31, 2023 |
| Developer | Statera Studio |
| Publisher | PQube |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Full), To be released on Consoles (December 2023) |
| Genre | Fighting, Multiplayer |
| Number of Players | 1-2 |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | Pocket Bravery Website |
