My Brute is a $4.99 title in the App Store that really reminds me of my son’s fascination with Pokemon Cards.  In My Brute, you create, customize, and train a competitor and fight an opponent.  As you do so, you take advantage of social elements (reminding me of a Facebook game) where you can have folks join your dojo training center.  It is more than collecting friends though as you can pick up skills from those that join you in your training.  Along with the social element, there is also a real-time element to the game.  You are only allowed a limited number of bouts per day.  These bouts are against other people’s “brutes” that they have been training.  This encourages you to practice though, and it it through this practice that you gain skill. And, to make things more interesting, you are allowed to create up to eight different customized “brutes” in your dojo.  This, in effect, allows you 40 bouts per day.

In total, there are 70 different skills and weapons to master and 8 different arenas.  And, when you start up your dojo, you can select one of three different styles to concentrate on.  With all the different brutes you can create, joining other’s dojos, and having them join yours, there is a lot of surprising depth in this game.

One issue with the game is in selecting a character name.  I don’t know how many total characters are in the Brute universe of dojos, but character names have to be unique.  Sometimes finding a unique one takes longer than all the setup and configuration of the character.  It would be nice if, based on your location and dojo name and so forth, the game could maybe offer you some suggestions.  My biggest issue however was in actually figuring out what to do.  It would be great if there was a tutorial walk-through or something that would help get you started.  For those of us that never played the internet version, it can be a bit overwhelming and confusing.