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Obscurity

Brigador

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Great Leader is dead.

 

You have one night to liberate Solo Nobre.

 


 


 

What is it?

As they say on the website: "Brigador is an isometric vehicular action game. Choose the right vehicle and weapons to suit your play style, and face off against the occupying factions. Discover tactics and unlock new vehicles and weapons as you clear the city or die trying, then do it all over again."

 

It has been compared to Syndicate, Crusader: No Remorse, and Jungle Strike. Despite being in early access the game play loop is already tight and refined, more along the lines of Hotline Miami. You can dive in for a few minutes of action, or alternately spending a couple of hours trying to achieve the perfect run.

 

One thing that it is not is a twin-stick shooter. There are several systems being modeled under the hood, including ballistics and penetration, which means that it takes skill to make sure that you don't over or under shoot your targets. That along with the tank-style controls, means that each successful run feels well-won.

 

There are a handful of very different vehicles to start off with: tanks, mechs, and anti-grav; all of which require their own play style and tactics. They will be including more in subsequent updates, along with maps, and more enemy factions. In fact in the first update post-launch they should be adding in these bad boys to play with:

Loyalist Light Mech  http://i.imgur.com/9xiA2Wf.gif


Corvid Anti-Grav  http://i.imgur.com/taF7wNS.gif

 

Here are a few early access review/play-throughs as well:




 

Who did that awesome soundtrack?

The soundtrack is from Makeup and Vanity Set, and they are actually making even more tracks than are currently in the early access release. It should be over 2 hours total and will be available as a separate purchase eventually too. Here is a taste:


 

 

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Oh hey, nice. I'm a big fan of gausswerks, from back in the day that he did some amazing Johnny Fiveaces fanart.

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Yeah, as a 3D artist I am super jealous of his workflow for Brigador. He essentially gets to kitbash models together in 3ds max without concern for poly count or UV layout, since they are just 360 rendered into sprite form. That's how he is almost single-handedly able to churn out the crazy number of assets for this game.

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I tried this at PAX in a crowded room without much in the way of tutorial or developer attention and I bounced off pretty hard. It seemed really really easy, until it was suddenly really hard and I died in a few seconds. Obviously not the most optimal conditions though, so probably worth another try.

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I haven't managed to finish a run of this yet, like Dewar I think the difficulty can really spike if you're in a tough spot. But good god, the look and sound of this game is just phenomenal. It's like John Carpenter's Desert Strike. I've spent all day at work listening to the soundtrack. Right now the gameplay feels a little bare and there's obviously a long way to go with it, but I'm excited to see how it turns out.

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I tried this at PAX in a crowded room without much in the way of tutorial or developer attention and I bounced off pretty hard. It seemed really really easy, until it was suddenly really hard and I died in a few seconds. Obviously not the most optimal conditions though, so probably worth another try.

 

Yeah, it has some simple tutorials now and they said they have tweaked it to be slightly less punishing since PAX for the Early Access release due to feedback like yours.

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So i played this.

 

I really sincerely love this thing, but it comes with some caveats that make it not easy to universally recommend.

 

First though, i think i have to say that it's possibly one of the most striking and attractive games i've ever played. It's something that doesn't really come across in still screenshots or compressed footage.

The game plays a real neat trick, where all of its assets were rendered in 3d, converted to 2d sprites, and then combined with the data from the 3d modelling to create true 3d lighting across those sprites. The result they have in this game seems undeniable and unmistakable, it's absolutely beautiful to look at. It's an intensely detailed, populous, dense world that runs at a perfect 60fps, has persistent environmental destruction, and still feels like it has real three dimensional depth. It's something quite special.

 

And, mechanically, there's a fair bit more going on than you would normally expect from what appears to be a twin stick shooter. (For one, it's not a twin-stick shooter, purposefully awkward tank controls abound.) Definitely play the tutorials. There's a lot of concepts like z-axis being considered and having to manipulate the height of your shot by where you aim on the ground around you. (The example the tutorial gives you is having to aim past hover tanks so that your firing arc intersects with them in the air.) Your weapons also all have loudness stats, and if detected, enemies will search for the source of that sound instead of all instantly going aggro on you. Some matches can turn into an intense cat and mouse chase as you attempt to flee from a huge mob headed towards your last known position so you can go resupply elsewhere on the map. Alternately, you can use smaller weapons and faster vehicles to try and pick apart enemy mobs in more manageable numbers. Either way, you often end up weaving between buildings and trees both for cover and to simply break line of sight, keeping in mind that in these maps everything is destructible. (As an aside, the game could probably use some kind of onscreen gauge to track how much noise you're generating, because that can be pretty hard to get a feel for.)

 

That all said, i don't think this game really knows what to do with itself, because it's sandwiched by incredibly plain menus and a no-frills presentation. The campaign, containing missions that are actually quite enjoyable and well-designed, is presented as a list with text blurbs to set up what you should be doing. (Well-written text blurbs, but still.) There's no real sense of a connecting thread through those missions, by the time you have any picture of what is going on in the world the game is depicting, you'll likely be most of the way through. Moreover, the "freelance" mode the game offers, a not-quite-roguelite affair, is very strangely structured with its pre-baked sets of levels to work through. (Which are highly redundant as they often contain the same levels ad nauseum, and level sets aren't even "checked" off as you complete them.) You also set difficulty separately from the level sets in the form of a pilot that has a variety of difficulty modifying stats, so there's really not anything setting apart the different level packs that often contain the same levels.

It also tries to present itself as something where you have to make a risky choice to continue on in a level set or exit early to try and preserve some of your earned income for the run, but it kind of ends up being a false choice, and it's because the game has such hard swings. You can go into a level in a perfect situation and die in five seconds, you're as fragile coming out of a mission as you are going in. You don't have have character progression between levels in a set, you can't have a good run that you feel like you're going to cash in on pushing your luck.

 

That all said, unlocking all the vehicles and weapons and playing around with those combinations is super enjoyable and i've already sunk more than a couple dozen hours into it.

 

This is a game where if you know exactly what you're getting into, it's hard to imagine you would be upset about it. If what you want is a spiritual successor to 90's isometric action games like Desert Strike and Mechwarrior 3050, here you go. This is it. It's pretty awesome.

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