Titan Brawl review

Developer: Omnidrone

Price: Free
Version: 1.4
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

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Between games like Vainglory and Clash Royale, there seems to be a big market for competitive mobile games. Titan Brawl is a new game that takes a lot of concepts from MOBAs like Dota and tries to streamline them into a tight, mobile-focused, competitive multiplayer game. Unfortunately, Titan Brawl has so many rough edges that it's hard to imagine as the next big multiplayer mobile game.

Life in the fast lane

If you're even just tangentially aware of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs), it is clear that Titan Brawl takes its inspiration from the genre. There are lanes, heroes, creep minions, and towers, all of which are endemic to MOBAs and behave in a lot of the same ways as they do in other games of this type.

In Titan Brawl, each player has a totem on one end of the battlefield, and the goal of the game is to deal enough damage to your enemy's totem to destroy it. Usually, this involves some strategic deployment and management of your heroes and their special abilities.

Remember the titans

Instead of just being a by-the-numbers MOBA-style game, Titan Brawl does a few things to shake up the formula. The first of these is the presence of Titans, which are like extra powerful heroes that players can unleash against each other if a match has gone past a certain amount of time.

Other changes mostly come in the form of streamlining measures that make Titan Brawl feel more like Clash Royale than a fully-fledged MOBA. Players pre-select their full team of heroes and can only deploy them after a certain amount of time. These heroes do not respond to any sort of commands apart from buttons you can press to activate a hero's special ability. There is a mana bar at the bottom of the screen that governs how often and how many hero abilities you can use.

Tappy titans

Titan Brawl has both single- and multiplayer modes, which makes it full of things to do, but the main problem with the game is that none of it feels particularly good. The combat is mostly a waiting game that doesn't require a ton of strategy as much as it does a dedication to unlocking and upgrading heroes.

Whenever you complete a fight or one of the game's missions, you are rewarded with boxes that contain new heroes or materials to upgrade existing heroes. For whatever reason though, this system is needlessly clunky and slow, making it annoying to even claim your rewards.

Finally, if you are a free player, the runway you have to earn these rewards at a steady clip is very short. After only an hour or two with the game, you'll need to grind out boxes through missions while losing tons of multiplayer matches against players stronger than you to get what you need to progress in either the single- or multiplayer mode.

The bottom line

The core of Titan Brawl resembles a lot of other successful and good games, but the overall experience feels like a checklist of features that aren't particularly well put together rather than a cohesive experience.