Go All Out

I'll be straight with you: my first instinct with any platform fighter is to benchmark it against Brawlhalla or Rivals of Aether and see how fast the seams show. Go All Out shows its seams, but it takes longer than expected. The core loop is health-bar-based brawling across 3D arenas, no ring-outs, which immediately separates it from the Smash formula even while borrowing heavily from its movement vocabulary. You get light attacks, heavy attacks, a block gauge that depletes under pressure and tanks your dash and dodge when it runs dry, combo breakers, wall bounces, and an air chaining system. The special gauge can be overstacked past the standard super attack into an extended chain of supers, which is the most interesting mechanical wrinkle the game has and the thing most likely to cause a couch eruption. The roster is the game's biggest swing and its most divisive element. Characters pull from genuinely eclectic sources: Teslakid from Teslagrad, Cole Black (the amnesiac mercenary from Get Even), Breakbone from the Polish comic series Kayko and Kokosh, Lady Scarlet from Desert Child, and Yandere-Chan, among others. None of these are household names in the West, which makes the crossover angle feel more like a curiosity than a selling point. That said, each character plays differently enough that playstyle variations (unlockable alternate kits that change how a character feels in hand) give you a reason to invest in a main rather than just cycling through. The Arcade mode offers four branching paths, Survival is self-explanatory, and you can stack up to eight players locally, which is the mode where this game actually lives. Online is where the cracks open up. The player pool is thin. Finding a random match takes patience, and the competitive infrastructure that would justify grinding toward any kind of ladder simply is not there. If you have friends who will actually queue with you, the online co-op and PvP modes are functional enough to get through an evening. If you are expecting a live matchmaking ecosystem, look elsewhere. Netcode quality is not something the community has loudly praised, which for a platform fighter dependent on frame-tight inputs is a real concern. Steam reviews land in mixed territory at around 65 percent positive across a small sample, which is honest: the game is competent but unpolished, with some visual inconsistency across stages and character models that read as budget without quite crossing into ugly. The cross-stage feature, where you select two arenas and the match transitions between them mid-fight, is a smart idea and reportedly predated a similar mechanic in a much bigger title. That kind of inventiveness is what makes you wish the game had more resources behind it. The Training Room covers the basics, unlockable equipment and cosmetics give you something to grind for, and GAO Points earned in-game fuel the in-game store without forcing a wallet tap. For a couch multiplayer night with people who are not precious about production values, Go All Out punches above its weight class. For solo players or anyone chasing competitive online, the active population just is not there to support the habit.

Fred · Scout Team

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