Brigador: Up-Armored Edition

In Brigador, you play as a mercenary in a neon-soaked cyberpunk metropolis that has fallen into chaos following the death of its Great Leader, whose militaristic isolationist regime ruled with an iron fist after taking over the city in a bloody civil war. On behalf of the megacity's former ruling elite, a ruthless megacorporation with limitless funds and cutting-edge futuristic weapons but few of its own forces on the ground, your aim is simple: destroy the regime and bring the city back under the megacorp's control by any means necessary. Using your choice of mech, tank, or anti-gravity vehicle with a vast arsenal, the game gives you considerable latitude to blast your way through vast tracts of glittering city blocks, densely packed slums and other urban and peri-urban environments as you see fit, allowing destruction of virtually all scenery on screen. Enemies come in three flavours: militarist regime Loyalists, scrapyard anarchist Corvids, and the elitist high-tech xenophobic Spacers. The gameplay is easy to learn but hard to master. The visuals and sound are truly spectacular at providing the player with a beautifully rendered isometric city being blown to smithereens, but enemies hit hard and can easily kill you near-instantly if you get swarmed, encouraging the player to adopt a deliberate and tactical playstyle rather than plowing through the city unhindered. While the artstyle might visually resemble a more peaceful early 2000s retro strategy game like SimCity or RollerCoaster Tycoon, the fluid vehicle animations and tight weapon physics make for a rewarding and difficult twin-stick shooter game with a strong tactical layer and light stealth mechanics. It also comes with an excellent synthwave soundtrack by Makeup and Vanity Set, which perfectly matches the retrofuturistic dystopian feel of the game. TLDR: Great Leader Is Dead. Solo Nobre Must Fall.

Welcome, Brigador! This is your vehicle, this is your contract. Kill, blow up, destroy, get paid. Buy better vehicles, buy better weapons, repeat. I've always thought the idea of being a mercenary, a "free lance", was pretty cool and whats cooler then doing it inside of a big mech, right? Brigador is a pretty cool game, even if it has some issues, but with how good it looks and how fun the Freelance mode is... I think it makes up for its short comings. +Both the graphics and the art style itself is wonderful. Everything looks very detailed, even from this top down perspective. The audio itself is very good as well, especially the music. +Tons of variety in what to use. Vehicles, guns, maps, play styles... You can stealth through things if you want which I didn't expect would be possible in a game centered around destruction like this. +The Freelance game mode is where this game shines for me. Choose a pilot, choose a vehicle (tanks, mechs or anti-gravity vehicles), choose your guns (from lazers to mortars to a .50 cal. Yes, of course they're still in use), choose an ability (smoke screen, EMP...), choose a map and kill everything. The more you destroy and kill, the more money you earn. The higher level pilot/weaker vehicle you have the more you'll gain at the end of it all. You can leave early but you won't get as much money if you had stayed throughout the entire mission, doing every objective. The longer you stay, the harder it gets. And if you die? You'll gain a fraction of the total money you made during that run. Use your money to buy new vehicles, new pilots, new guns, new maps. +I liked the world building a lot. One of the things you can get with the money you earn is information, text about the factions, the vehicles, the guns and their history and so on. Normally I'm not the biggest fan of reading walls of text back to back to learn some lore but in here I thought they were written in a really fun to read way that I didn't mind it at all, I liked it. +Lots of settings to customize your playthrough. Invincibility, infinite ammo, go wild just remember it disables achievements. +/- The destruction itself is 50/50. On one hand, when you hit something that explodes god does it look good and if there's several explosive things, like gas stations, next to each other and they all explode as a chain reaction from a single bullet hitting them... Its great. But buildings and walls can be annoying instead. They don't get destroyed immediately, depending on the damage they may crumble first. Unfortunately its very hard to see at times so you might start walking on a crumbled building, unable to move forwards and just walking in place until it gets enough damage to be fully destroyed. +/- The campaing, unlike the Freelance game mode, is meh. Its either too easy or too difficult. You either wipe the floor with the enemy or lose in the first minute and there's no in between. The story seems cool but when thats the gameplay experience, its not so fun. Freelance seems better balanced then the campaing. -I'm a fan of the tanks and the mechs. Their controls were a lil awkward at first but you can easily change how you want the game to behave in these vehicles in the settings so I put both of them into tank controls essentially where my W is forwards, A is turn the hull of the tank/body of the mech left, D is right and S is backwards and my mouse independently controls the turret. Its good, it worked well, even if certain things could be improved. But the anti-gravity vehicles? Torture. Genuine torture. It didn't matter what I tried, just torture to use. -At times, it can be quite difficult to tell where you are exactly. This is made worse if you can't quite tell if the apartment building you're trying to walk through is fully destroyed or if its just damaged and crumbled and needs to be hit some more. These two points combined make the moving harder then it needs to be and it makes the shooting harder too. Your guns have a blue and red line for your primary and secondary weapons, showing you where you are aiming. The issue is that these lines go on for eternity. If there's a building or wall in your way that your bullets will hit you won't know till you shoot and you realize you're not hitting your intended target. It would help so much if these blue and red aiming lines just stopped when they hit something solid instead of phasing through it, as far as I'm aware there isn't a setting for this specific issue so its just how it is. -Movement and horizontal aiming issues aside, the vertical aiming can be quite difficult too. Its a top down game, even if its at this angled camera perspective where its more like a 2.5D game then a true top down, 2D game you know? So because of this you can sometimes overshoot or undershoot targets. While its not terrible in most of the guns, in mortars and indirect weapons that can shoot over walls and obstacles, it can start to be an issue trying to judge the distance between where you think your shells are gonna land and where they actually end up landing. It has its issues but for a quick time waster, its pretty good. In a discount, if you're looking for something quick, something to waste an hour or two with then this can be good for it. I wouldn't consider it anything more then that though.

This is a really fun and challenging mech game. If you are a fan of Battletech you should definitely give this a try. Normally I would try and explain more but there really isn't much to say. Get in giant stompy robot with laser beams and have fun.

30 BILLION DEAD RAINCOATS. GREAT LEADER DESERVED IT. I AM THE SNC'S STRONGEST WAR CRIMINAL.

So much love and heart has gone into every detail of this. Sometimes you just want to strap an a-10 Gatling onto an armored hot dog truck and drive through the nice part of town. Is it the be all end all of game design? No. Does it feel and look and sound awesome while providing some tactical depth and lots of Freelanc content? Yes. Looks and plays great on steam deck, if you are willing to put the mouse aim on the trackpad.

Reminds me of X-Com meets Mech Warrior 2 meets Syndicate, so basically a millennial nostalgia bomb.

This used to be a positive review, but the more I thought about it the more this game's failings tick me off. I write this just after completing the Closed Casket Run. To me it feels like there is a good game somewhere in here, screaming to come out, but it just gets buried under baffling design decisions. In no particular order: 1. 80% of the game's weapons and vehicles are useless. There is zero internal balance, either you pick something overpowered (Rat King) or you die. Either you get the correct weapons or you can't deal with what's in front of you. 2. This goes for the enemies too: 80% of them are useless and deal next to no damage, 20% of them can do 100 damage to you from across the screen. Good luck if you didn't pick something that can handle a cannon shell to the face, since it's too fast to dodge. 3. Mech and tank movement is HORRIBLE. You will spend three business days just trying to face your enemy. 4. Aiming is almost as bad. You have to be a masochist to use a railgun, just load up with miniguns or cannons. 5. Explosives can end your run and there is almost zero indication that the building in front of you is actually a nuke. Eventually you just learn to stay away from anything static. 6. The most effective tactic I found was actually camping. Enemies aren't smart enough to dodge howitzers, so just stand behind a wall and pepper them. Even better, they walk towards the last explosion, so you don't even have to move your mouse. 7. WHY ARE AMMUNITION PICKUPS DESTRUCTIBLE? I'm not talking about depots, rather the small yellow icons on the ground. They already disappear before you're done with the enemy, why add this extra grievance for apparently no reason? 8. The ammunition economy itself has no balance. Either you never run out, or you get stuck in a death loop because you can't find enough to kill enemies to earn more. It only adds more reasons to stick with the weapons that don't risk this. 9. Why can't depot types be seen from afar? I'm not going to spend three hours walking around the map to find the type that matches my weapons. 10. Building for anything other than open combat is not going to work outside the absolute easiest difficulties. Taking small/stealthy vehicles is just shooting yourself in the foot. (If the argument is that lighter vehicles are a self imposed challenge, I have to reply I don't enjoy this game enough to consider it) I'm sure I could list more points. Graphics are good and so is the music, but I'd rather suggest you get a game that won't relentlessly annoy you with problems that could easily have been fixed before or even after production.

Fun for a while, nice music but gets repetitive. If the game mechanics were developed more, this could have the potential of being an amazing game. The core idea is there but the execution needs some work. That being said, it's cheap on sale, so it's definitely worth a try.

Very good, challenging game, I personally like the mercenary kinda evil campaign challenges and lore, there's a lot of different pilots, vehicles, all sorts of fun to be had. The maps all provide their own routes and ways to fight in , it is fun to go back and play through the freelance mode with different unlimited build options. Fun achievements to chase. Game sounds and looks amazing. Its really impressive how good it is a decade on. There is something about watching the little people panic and flee that never gets old. The carnage is glorious. Once you start unlocking different pilots and difficulty/payout modifiers the game has a lot of replay options. Excited for Brigador Killers

What a blast this game is.