Pros
-Same great Smash Bros. gameplay
-More characters than ever
-Allows you to use a Wavebird
-Cutscenes look really nice
-Can be played online
Cons
-Online play doesn't work as well as it should
-Single player campaign is highly repetitive
-A lot of the new stages stink
-Pretty much Melee with the name changed and new elements tacked on
Brawl certainly had big shoes to fill. Melee was the Gamecube's best selling game and for good reason. It took everything that was good about the original Smash Bros and turned it into a faster game with tighter controls, but not only that, it added a lot of new elements and turned Smash Bros into a must buy. Now Brawl is poised to become one of the Wii's top selling games and most Smash fans are satisfied.
Most.
Brawl's core is what it needs to be,
great Smash Bros gameplay. The tight controls, the frenetic action,
the doofy items, they're all back. When you sit down with a few of
your friends, you're going to relive your favorite moments again,
like yelling loudly at one another and punching your friend in the
face because he got to the beam sword before you did. The controls
are tight, and you can, thankfully, use gamecube controllers to play.
One issue my friends and I found however was that many of the new
stages simply aren't fun to play. We ended up using Melee stages like
Corneria more than any of the new stages. It is good that Nintendo
included these old stages, but we shouldn't need them, the Brawl
stages should have been able to stand on their own but many simply do
not. But still, the core gameplay, the Smash Bros spirit lives on in
Brawl. For simple multiplayer action on the Wii, Brawl is a good bet.
However...
There is more to this game than just sitting down with your friends and messing around. There's online play and a lengthy single play campaign, neither of which are very worthwhile additions to the game. The single player story (if you can call it that) is abusively repetitive. It consists almost entirely of holding right on the control stick, pressing A and repeating that for almost ten hours. There are very well done cutscenes that break up the action, but once they come and go, you have to slog through more enemies and maybe fight a boss, which is usually a slightly larger version of a normal enemy. It's not fun, it's not interesting, it's entirely unnecessary. But alas, the easy way to unlock most of the games characters is to play it.
After the forced march that is The Subspace Emissary, maybe a little online play can help one relax, if you can get it to work that is. While getting online is easy for some, I had to install Nintendo's WiFi dongle, change several MAC addresses and change numerous firewall settings before the online would even operate, and even then I could barely connect to opponents. However, I can't hold that against the game, the online works for many people, maybe mine is a rare case. But even when I finally got online, there was something missing from the experience. To me, Smash Bros is not a game you play alone in a room. When you fight other people in Smash Bros, half of the fun is shouting at one another and in general having a merry time. That side of the multiplayer is lost online, so I did not find it to be an enjoyable experience, it was like fighting more intelligent bots.
Make no mistake Brawl is still a good game. It looks good and sounds good along with controlling well. And the experience I cherish most, playing with friends is still great fun. But at that point, Brawl is really just Melee. Sure there are new characters, new abilities like the smash ball, and a few great new stages, but when Brawl tries to be more than Melee, it fails. The Subspace Emissary is frustrating and boring, most of the new stages aren't very fun, and the online can be difficult to use and ultimately unsatisfying . I know full well I am in disagreement with the consensus on Brawl, but for me, Melee is still a better game. If a game is truly great, it can attract people who wouldn't generally like that type of game. Brawl is not one of those games. If you love Smash Bros, you'll love Brawl. If you aren't interested, don't bother, Brawl isn't going to change your mind.