After over a year of exclusive availability on iOS, Android players can finally play Brawl Stars in soft launch. The game is available now on Google Play, but only in a few countries, including Canada. Google Play soft launches only allow accounts and devices in a particular country to download a soft launch, so it’s tough to get ‘legitimately’. However, APK mirrors do exist, but it appears that Supercell is requiring the use of a VPN in order to use the game. Canada is one of the countries, so if you have VPN access to servers in that country, you should be able to play by only jumping through a few hoops.
These are the countries that have the soft launch:
- Canada
- Finland
- Sweden
- Norway
- Denmark
- Ireland
- Hong Kong
- Macau
- Malaysia
- Singapore
So…find a VPN in one of those countries. Or move to one of those countries! That’s overkill, but who am I to judge?
This Android soft launch happened a lot later than I think anyone was expecting. The game seemed like an absolute winner when it first soft launched on iOS in mid-June 2017. Supercell indicated that the reason they weren’t on Android was because of the ease of obtaining the game in soft launch on Android. Perhaps the additional soft launch territories, plus figuring out the VPN block, made Supercell more confident in releasing on Android. Though, there’s always a way around these kinds of blocks.
Brawl Stars looks a lot different than it did a year ago, having moved to landscape orientation with dual-stick controls instead of the portrait mode with tapping that the game previously used. Progression was overhauled, and new game modes added, though the core game hasn’t changed. Brawl Stars feels like the game itself has real potential, but Supercell has shown a surprising amount of insecurity about their next game up until now. But with the soft launch finally landing on Android, perhaps the long-awaited global release is soon at hand. Or maybe it won’t happen until 2022 and the game’s only playable on Magic Leap.
