I’m sure that at some points in your life you’ve been given one of those selection boxes of miniature chocolates, right? Imagine for a second that instead of simply handing you the box at Christmas, your dear old Auntie instead opens it up, throws the contents at you and asks you to sum up the entire lot right then and there. Playing and writing about Smash Brothers Brawl ends up being a remarkably similar experience in many ways; there’s plenty of colour and tasty goodness to be had, but at the same time you’re left pondering if it falls foul of being much too much of a good thing for its own good at times.

Of course, criticising anything for packing in too much fun is a little like criticising Kirsten Dunst for being too attractive and as such your feelings for Smash Brothers will inevitably end up – and believe me, I didn’t want to say this as it’s somewhat obvious – relying on just how much you love Nintendo and their bustling back catalogue of oddities. Mario Kart Wii might have packed in a whole load of love for Nintendo’s cast and crew, but Smash Brothers buys them flowers, expensive cars and wedding rings to boot. At times it all feels like trying to eat the world’s biggest pie with the world’s smallest one-pronged fork.

Primarily, the game is pretty much exactly the same to play as its predecessors in that you control one of a selection of characters as you try to bash, smash and crash opponents to accumulate enough damage to knock them off of a small contained battle arena before they do the same to you. Not content with allowing simple fisticuffs, the game also throws pretty much every power-up and weapon under the sun into the level throughout the joust, leading to all sorts of curious situations that you could never have possibly imagined. Well, that’s unless you regularly find yourself thinking about Kirby smashing Solid Snake over the head with a lightsaber, of course. The gears of my mind don’t crank that way, but if yours do then hey, good for you!

The fighting itself is kept rather simple; you have a normal attack and a special attack, with each having different variations depending on what direction you were holding at the time. There’s a shield option should you wish to go on the defensive and a jump option that helps either dodge attacks or to aid your little character to grab back on to the edge of the level should you be on the receiving end of a bit of a biffing, It’s the kind of thing that pretty much anyone can pick up and have a mash at,

At its heart, Smash Brothers is often intense, exciting and hilarious. Helped no-end by the ensemble cast of characters ranging from Mario and (yay) Kirby to slightly more obscure folk such as Mr. Game and Watch and Marth (Fire Emblem, supposedly), each of whom have their own familiar attacks and special powers based on their particular video game (or games), the combat ends up becoming somewhat similar to a playground bundle with everyone piling in and battering each other with a flurry of blows. That’s not to say that tactics don’t help – they very much do, but even when you make a conscientious effort to steer clear of trouble and play things cleverly you still end up getting dragged into the melee more often than not.

Thus, it’s not hard to imagine that fighting game aficionados who pride themselves on learning intricate combinations and counters may feel a little miffed by the whole thing initially, but this goes back to my earlier comment about it being easy for anyone to pick up and is probably the whole point of the thing. In the way that Mario Kart is very much a racing game for people who don’t necessarily enjoy racing, Smash Brothers is the kind of insane, ability-levelling action that will give everyone and anyone a stab at doing well. Obviously when it comes to multiplayer the better players with more of a grip on the finer points of the controls will tend to win the day, but it ensures that they’ll at least face a challenge getting there.

While on the subject of controls, Nintendo have done a pretty good job at catering for pretty much every eventually you could have wanted, although some prove more useful than others. The worst of these, the option to use the Wii-mote on its own but turned sideway, is soon rather handicapped by how awkward it is to use the B button when it’s behind a lump of sideways plastic, but the remaining three schemes all give a more traditional control feel and are rather effective. Personal preference saw me relying on the classic controller, but anyone with a GameCube pad knocking about or a Nunchuck to attach to your Wii-mote will get pretty much the same control scheme to work with.

Although you’d be correct in assuming that the main fun – and indeed focus – of Brawl is multiplayer japery, Nintendo have loaded the single player cannon full of modes and collectables to keep you plugging away on your lonesome. Be it battling through a string of opponents in Classic mode, undertaking a number of scenarios in Event mode or giving yourself a bit of training should you wish to learn the ins and outs of a new character, there’s a decent chunk of meat on the bone.

The main single player mode, however, is the Subspace Emissary mode in which battles and side-scrolling platform sections are chained together by a simple storyline. To cut a short story even shorter, the archetypal bad guys of the game – you Wario, your Bowser etc – are rampaging through a number of locations firing a special gun at the good guys so they can turn them into trophies and collect them for some reason or other. One could perhaps assume that they want to sell them on eBay or something.

In theory the Subspace Emissary sounds good fun and for a while it is, but quite quickly you start becoming somewhat bored of the same rinse-and-repeat sections being papered over with different characters and settings. It also goes on for far too long as well; ploughing through it would have been far more enticing had each battle or section added a depressingly small percentage to your completion rate, and although it does offer you the chance to unlock new characters, trophies and stickers (basically power-up badges for the mode) it really begins to drag the longer you have to tug on through.

As I mentioned, widdling on through this mode gives you an avalanche of unlockable extras, from characters such as Sonic and Snake to new battle arenas, miniature trophies of various Nintendoland stuff and a pretty comprehensive tracklisting of Nintendo tunes that you can listen to if you’re not one of the cool crowd hopping onto the Jay-Z Glastonbury bandwagon.

In the case of the characters and levels this is fair enough – unlocking a new fighter or a new arena is pretty much a staple of fighting games and adds a bit of interest along the way, and the levels bring a smile by being occasionally wonderfully oddball, such as the Game and Watch effort or the Wario World cartoon crayon one. You don’t actually have to unlock them by working through the Subspace mode either, although the way in which you can alternatively do so – i.e. completing a certain amounts of runs through the arcade mode or taking part in a certain number of brawls – is pretty much the same slog without the added throwaway story backing it up. As a result, those SEGA diehards amongst you who were looking forward to slapping Mario silly with Sonic are going to have to wait a decent chunk of time before even getting the opportunity.

On the other hand gaining trophies and the music is rather easier, and it’s pretty lucky too as to be frank they’re a nice distraction for, oh, about 15 seconds and then little more. Okay, okay – they do come with a little ramble about who or what they are and which titles they appeared in, but do we really need to read details about green shells and Pikmin onions? There’s also the option to arrange them in some cute diorama and snap pictures of them if you should wish, but unless you’re a incorrigible hoarder or a completionist then there’s little value in them other than as a temporary curiosity.

Multiplayer options provide the backbone of the entertainment and will undoubtedly end up being where the most fun is to be had in Brawl. There’s tons of options to work through should you wish – tournaments, one-off matches in one-versus-one or two-versus-two… the possibilities are endlessly tweakable, and as with the nature of the game they provide for a great deal of entertainment. Thankfully, Nintendo have also seen fit to enable online battling and it works really very well indeed given the amount of action going on, although one minor quibble is that the friends code system still proves frustratingly fiddly. An added bonus lumped in with the whole lot is that you can also create your very own stages and post them online or to chums should you wish, which is a nice touch and adds welcome dollop of user-created content to the whole show.

The show is, certainly, densely packed as you can see, but… but. See, on one hand Smash Brothers is a game that thrives on the amount of time you put into it, rewarding you with so much stuff to play with and through that you could end up never touching some parts of it for hours. It’s a classic case of the more you put in, the more you end up getting back.

On the other hand, Brawl just doesn’t feel like a game that you want to play for extended periods of time in order to get that stuff in the first place. That’s not to say it’s a bad game by a long chalk; the fighting is fun, pitiless in its detail and packed full of that special brand of Nintendo charm that makes rainbows happen and yada yada, but at the same time the small chunks of gaming fun that it does provide are at the end of the day a lot of the same thing, and it leaves you not really wanting to chain together hours on the thing. In a way it’s an idea party title or game to break up frustrating periods of play on a longer adventure or RPG game, and as such you never really feel like you are going to want to spend enough time on it to unlock half the content.

Thus, it all ends up with our box of chocolates again: your brain tells you that you love the stuff and your stomach initially tells you that you’re hungry, but the more you eat the less you feel like delving back in for some more, even if it’s still the same good stuff you know you like. Smash Brothers: Brawl is certainly that very same ‘good stuff’, but for this reviewing monkey at least it’s something that works much better sparingly rather than in prolonged sessions. Combine that with the amount of stuff on offer and you come to the situation whereby you know that there’re options and bonuses out there for you to collect, but that you don’t really ever feel like spending enough time to get them. You can hardly criticise it as it doesn’t do much wrong, but for all the love, care and attention you never really feel that Brawl is anything other than a decent update to what was already a good series.