As you can tell from this clip, the game looks amazing and it feels silky smooth (although it did crash on me once). Most importantly, it avoids what I consider as the biggest sin of mobile games nowadays (especially the Chinese ones) -- it doesn’t cram itself full of different systems.

And since each game lasts for about a minute, it’s highly playable at any given moment of your day.

On paper, this should sound like a perfect game. But in actuality, here’s the problem: It’s perhaps too simple.

Since the types of attack are so limited, with no items that you can pick up in-game, with a map that has nothing to explore, the game feels like it’s severely lacking in variety, be it in terms of gameplay or spectating experience.

And the game’s biggest weakness is that it lacks genuine in-game tension and any edge-of-your-seat moments. I understand that the game tries to build its tension around the tug-of-war aspect, with each side trying to stay around the gem-springing well for as long as possible. But I’d have to say it doesn’t feel very tense.

Furthermore, with each game lasting only one minute, it doesn’t feel like it carries any sort of stakes. Within the first three hours I played the game, I mainly recorded lopsided wins (mostly because I was playing against bots). But even with the losses, with many of them also being quite lopsided, it didn’t feel like a big deal to me at all.

In other words, I felt like if a friend wanted to interrupt me while I was playing, I’d let them. I wouldn’t say “Shut up, I am playing a game.”

To be fair, there are other modes in this game. What stands out the most is perhaps its 10-player battle royale mode. But with no items that you can pick up and the fact that you can see where threats are coming from (because it’s a 2D game seen from a bird’s eye view), there’s no sense of surprise in battle.

Besides battle royale, there is also a mode in which you can play 3v3 football and another in which you try to deal as much damage to the opposing team’s base as possible.

How Arena of Valor and Brawl Stars feel similar is actually interesting given that the format is Tencent’s flagship mobile game and Tencent owns 84% of Supercell.

Arena of Valor, China’s mobile League of Legends, is aiming to be the world’s go-to mobile esport

While it remains to be seen if Brawl Stars can amount to the level of success met by Clash Royale, it’s definitely a game that you should check out during the holiday season.

Tencent partners with Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider maker Square Enix