Brawl Stars spent a year reinventing itself and it worked.

Matches are three minutes, top-down, twin-stick. You pick one brawler from a roster that now sits north of 60, drop into one of a dozen-plus modes — Gem Grab, Showdown, Brawl Ball, Heist, Hot Zone, Knockout, the rotating ranked playlist — and either win or get out. There are no menus to wade through between rounds, no five-minute lobby waits, no warmup. The session loop is the whole point.

Each brawler has a primary attack, a chargeable super, a passive Star Power unlocked at level 9, and one of two Gadgets you slot before the match. The 2024 progression rework folded the old token-and-box system into a more direct upgrade path — Power Points feed into Power Levels, Credits unlock new brawlers, and the hypercharge ability at Power 11 is the new ceiling for ranked play.

Brawl Pass is the seasonal track. It runs in tandem with the rotating modes, a free-to-enter Mega Pig clan event, and the Brawl Stars Championship — Supercell's esports circuit with monthly online qualifiers feeding a live World Finals.

The 2024 reinvention worked. Supercell publicly credited the year's overhaul — the progression rework, the Brawl Pass Plus tier, the hypercharge mechanic, and a steadier cadence of new brawlers — with returning the game to record-setting revenue after a soft 2022 and 2023. Whether you care about the business or not, the on-the-ground effect is that the matchmaking pool is full at every skill level and the meta moves fast enough to stay interesting.

Combat feel is the quiet win. Aiming is a draggable joystick with an optional auto-aim tap, the supers commit on release with a visible arc, and the projectile physics are legible enough that you can read a fight in your peripheral vision. Nothing else in the short-session shooter category — Standoff 2, Bullet Echo, even Apex Legends Mobile while it lasted — moves with this much weight per shot.

The monetisation is honest about being a Supercell game and that's the problem. Gems are the premium currency, sold from $0.99 starter offers up to $99.99 chest bundles, and the Brawl Pass at 169 gems a season is reasonable on its own. But the Brawl Pass Plus tier, the hypercharge unlocks, and the special-offer banners that fire after every fourth or fifth match add up to a UI that's selling something on roughly half the screens you tap through. Free-to-play is genuinely free-to-play — you can grind every brawler eventually — but the eventually is long.

Matchmaking at the ranked tier still pairs three-stacks against solo queue more often than it should, and the disconnect penalty hits whether your team left or your network did. On older iPhones the post-match victory screen takes longer to load than the match itself runs.

If you want a short-session competitive game that respects three minutes of your attention and doesn't make you log in daily to stay relevant, install it. If you bounce off any game with a battle pass and a gem store on the home screen, no amount of polish will get you past the first week. The next thing to watch is whether the ranked seasonal cadence holds — Supercell's edge is a steady drip of new brawlers and modes, and the moment that slows the meta calcifies fast.