Game 27: Brigador

Brigador is an isometric shooter from 2016 - and that's about all I know going in. The first mission description is instantly confusing:

Solo Nobre is hiring me and I lose my Solo Nobre citizenship? What?

The mission itself doesn't do a lot to alleviate that confusion. There's a bunch of people running in circles with flashlights. I do my best not to step on them because they don't seem to be a threat, and I eventually find some poor unarmed schmuck that's labeled as the mission target and squish him.

Couldn't we just sign the contract instead?

The intro after this 'learn to walk and shoot' mission sheds a bit more light on the situation.

SNC really should have named themselves something else.

Ok, so I'm a Brigador, which is someone who accepted a contract to work for the Solo Nobre Concern. The Solo Nobre Concern are NOT the nation of Solo Nobre, which has been taken over by a 'Dear Leader' North Korea-style tyrant type (or so claims the SNC). Even though I am not expected to survive, my likely Heroic Sacrifice is appreciated in the efforts to overthrow Dear Leader. I have my doubts about whether SNC are actually the 'good guys' here or not, and those doubts are not assuaged by the appearance of our main character.

I appear to be leaking

The combat so far is interesting - it's not super-detailed but you seem to have a mix of shields and health and my initial impression of Brigador is that it's tried for a blend of arcade and simulation game. You have limited ammo so you can't just shoot everything but you can find pickups to restore your shields and ammunition mid-mission - but the ammo pickups act like real objects in that you can accidentally shoot them and blow them up rather than having them add to your ammo supply.

I love these textures for destroyed houses, they look great.

SNC seems to be paying me a small bonus for stepping on civilians and destroying random non-military property, but hey, a girl's got to make a living.

In addition to the campaign mode, there's also a 'freelance' and 'acquisitions' option available from the main menu.

SNC found Norman and basically said 'might as well let him drive a truck into battle'.

It looks like you can use money obtained from campaign missions to unlock these freelance pilots, and use this money to get equipment for campaign missions rather than it being a larger integrated campaign.

The game ALMOST feels too dark but it's not, you can see enemies clearly and the aesthetic feels good.

I got a tooltip that recommended I turn on Easter Eggs in settings - and sure, why not? The settings menu also has an option to just turn on invincibility if you feel like stomping through the game unopposed. Continuing the campaign, it looks like you don't get to choose or customize your vehicle / weapons in this mode - these are set missions which change characters / vehicles, but in Freelance mode you can buy additional vehicles and weapons to play with.

I may as well do the whole campaign first then since I'm getting a ton of money from it.

Money can be used to unlock additional vehicles and weapons, but also the rest of the contract you signed in the lore section!

That's quite the termination clause in the event of breach of contract.

The combat in Brigador has a great feel to it that makes it more than an arcade shooter - your projectiles inherit your momentum, meaning that if you're running around really fast shooting sideways you need to account for that with slower projectiles.

Units have different armor in the sides and front / rear so you'll kill enemies much faster if you can flank them.

Enemies aren't just mindless things that come after you, they have awareness and you can take them by surprise if you come around on their side or use abilities like active camouflage or smoke. I'm finding it to be a lot of fun to play. There's a three-dimensional aspect to combat as well - your weapons and vehicle exist at a certain height so you can hit taller foes over short cover.

This is especially important when fighting enemy 'agravs' which hover, your shots can pass right under them.

Yeah I think SNC definitely aren't the good guys, they're paying bonuses for killing civilians and causing collateral damage!

At least they pay well, I'd go to war myself for a million per mission.

I've been thinking the game is on the easy side but I now realize that the first... thirteen missions of the campaign have all been tutorial levels to familiarize you with the three vehicle options for going through the campaign.

Each pip represents completing the same level with a different vehicle

You keep your damage and ammunition through the end of the mission so you need to not get beat up too badly early on. The three vehicles available now are a 'mech' with decent firepower and toughness, a big beefy open-topped slow tank, and an agile 'agrav' hover vehicle. The biggest threat to me isn't the enemies, it's the explosive materials that I sometimes don't see and accidentally blow up when I'm standing next to them.

And then they make you pay for your own funeral

The campaign is changing things up more than I expected - after just a few missions with the vehicles I got accustomed to in the tutorial, those guys hopped a shuttle and went off planet.

After making 15 million dollars I'd leave too.

Now my choices are from four vehicles that seem to comprise a small military unit, I like the variety here and I'm glad we're seeing a lot of different options as we move onward.

I CAN BE A LITTLE BATTLESUIT I MUST TRY THIS

By mission 04 Great Leader is apparently dead (I have no idea how, I didn't kill him) and I'm fighting 'Corvids' who I think are another faction. The lore / story here aren't presented very well and remain confusing - the game wants me to go buy the lore that will tell me additional details but it doesn't say which lore to purchase!

These blue Corvid vehicles make me feel like the police are after me

The little battlesuit is hard to operate but not because it's fragile - it's not even that underpowered. The reason it's difficult is because the upper torso isn't a full turret so if you're walking directly away from the enemy it has trouble turning all the way around to get a bead on the target.

Every mission now is giving me a different selection of four vehicle to choose from and it's delightful. At this point I'm completely checking out of the story and enjoying killing things.

This grav-tank is really great, it has a high-powered laser that wrecks everything

I cannot in good conscience pass up the chance to use a 'killdozer;

Why be one vehicle when you can be 10 vehicles all mushed together

The different vehicles provide some nice variation in gameplay. Some really are built for cloak-and-dagger style stealth approaches to missions where you try to stay hidden and pop out from the flanks to quickly kill enemies and hide again.

Nice variety in the levels too, facing these strange tall spotters in the cornfields.

I'm going to have to crush about 100 gravestones to knock over this statue, which will win the people over

Just checking in on the story, let's see what's going on...

Aren't WE seditious against Great Leader too guys?

I've reached the end of the numbered missions (The mission numbering for the campaign is bizzare - missions D3, *2, D4, E1 are coming up) and it doesn't look like this whole operation went well for the Brigadors.

We're the last four left alive on the planet.

The missions past 21 are much tougher (and I suspect optional) - it took me several tries to find a way to beat this army of bikes.

They just kept swarming me and were followed up by a heavy tank, nasty combination.

These levels were where I felt Brigador started to really shine and hit it's stride of being seriously challenging, requiring a change in tactics and vehicles for each level before I found a way through. In one I learned to love using the mortar, which I had previously hated for being so ponderous, suddenly it become extremely useful facing larger, slower groups of enemies - and I started disengaging from the enemy rather than just killing everything in a group, because the enemy groups were becoming too dangerous to beat in a straight-up fight even for the vehicles designed for an all-out brawl. The final campaign levels probably tipped the difficulty scale into the 'too hard' zone, each one was very long and took multiple attempts.

One became an exercise in effective mortar usage against tough opponents

Another I eventually beat by using chemical gas on chokepoints to kill swarms of smaller foes

With all the campaign levels complete, let's take a brief look at Freelance. I have a ton of money saved up from the campaign so I can already buy a lot of the stuff that's available. It looks like in Freelance mode you can be any unit in the game after you buy it, and that includes absolutely useless options.

Such as being an infantryman. It did not go well,

It also includes this insane thing with a giant head.

This is not going to fit on the escape shuttle

There's an enormous variety of 'mechs and vehicles to try and a lot of levels, and if I feel the inclination to shoot things I may jump back in from time to time - but for my part those last campaign levels have me feeling like that was enough and it's time to move on.