On Friday the 13th, 2022, GameMill Entertainment, Ludosity, and Play Fair Labs announced a brand new set of DLC for their platform fighting game, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, several months after the game's initial release in 2021. The new DLC, known as the Universe Pack, is essentially a mini-season pass that grants owners access to new characters as soon as they're released. The first character in the Universe Pack comes from the Nick cartoon “My Life as a Teenage Robot”, which stars an energetic android named Jenny Wakeman (XJ9) who has the personality of your average teenage human girl, along with the strength of a million and 70 men (at least according to the original theme song). The character comes complete with her own stage along with an alternative Hot-Rod costume based on one of the episodes from the cartoon.

While Jenny is available for purchase at the time of this article, the second and third characters announced for the pack include Hugh Neutron from the popular 2001 cartoon/movie “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius”, along with a character from the nostalgic 90s cartoon, Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life. While Hugh will be available for download this Summer, Rocko will be available for download this Fall.

The overall public reception for the announcement seems to be mostly positive as commenters have praised the publisher and development teams for their commitment to updating the game with new characters. Even more so, most of the praise has been coming from various fans of Hugh Neutron, whose popularity has grown over the year due to various clips passed around on social media, as well as popular jokes and memes that have spread all across the internet.

Mark DeCarlo, the voice actor for Hugh Neutron, has shown plenty of excitement as he has been rallying support for the character's inclusion in the game ever since its initial reveal of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl back in July of 2021.

Despite all the positive reception, there has also been a noticeable amount of negative comments, as previous fans of the game have critiqued the developers for the lack of consistent updates to the game, as well as the lack of content and features that keep the game from being a complete package. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl launched with a barebones single-player campaign, no voice acting for any of the playable characters, no items in casual play, no cross-platform play, and lackluster online play features. Despite this, various developers including Thaddus Crews, the Character Designer and Programmer for the game, have expressed their commitment to fleshing out the game with more content.

Nickelodeon All-Star Braw has been in a very stagnant position for months, as the game's overall player base fell nearly two weeks after launch due to the issues listed above, and despite releasing two characters for free, Garfield and Shredder from TMNT, the player base hasn't recovered since. While this new Universe Pack DLC has sparked some life back into the game, it may not be enough to give it the player boost it needs to last throughout the year. With so many other games coming out each month that will be fighting for our time and attention, the team at Ludosity is going to have to pick up the pace if they want to see the game flourish, along with the higher-ups at Nickelodeon when it comes to funding, as many issues with the game could have been addressed with a higher budget.

Personally speaking, I had high hopes for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl when it first came out, as the combat felt very fast and aggressive when compared to Super Smash Bros. or other similar platform fighting games, but I also ended up dropping the game after two weeks along with the rest of the player base on Steam as it became increasingly difficult to find matches. While it is possible to install mods to add voice-overs into the PC version of the game, the sound quality is very mixed, as some characters in the game come from voice actors that are no longer of this Earth, and the shows they worked have either been poorly archived, so retrieving quality audio for each character has been difficult.

Despite the negatives, I do feel that there is a generally fun time to be had playing Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, but the kinks need to be ironed out sooner than later. Until then, hopefully, a few tournaments and invitational competitions can keep people's interest as they continue to develop the game.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is available on Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.