Brigador was a title I heard heard a little bit of, but was a game where the small amount of screenshots that existed for it failed to convince me to buy it on release. Seriously team! most of your presskit is photos of the staff, not pics the game.

The Up-Armoured Edition was a relaunch as a free update to the classic version, and is where I jumped into the game after it appeared on Humble Monthly. While still uncertain on it, I decided to start playing yesterday and got rather hooked into it.

Brigador is an isometric shooter. The Great Leader is dead. And you take on a selection of squishy humans piloting various vehicles in order to earn enough credits to get off this planet before things turn to hell even more than they already are.

And you earn these credits by blowing things up and stomping around. In a fully destructible environment, there's plenty of stuff to make go boom. And while I find the game is best done in short mission bursts rather than one long haul, it is always satisfying to trash the game's play field.

The only real downside I had getting into this game is a rather long forced tutorial. It serves as a way to get out a lot of the added lore to the free update and introduce you to the way each type of vehicle plays.

But it was just too long for me, especially as you can unlock the story lore if you really want it. Once you get into the mainline campaign missions and have a selection of loadouts to choose from the game feels much better. I can understand why this decision was made, though it is let down by the Freelance (-scenario-) mode where you can unlock and play as what you want in various crafted maps to better learn them.

It serves to make the difficulty curve a bit deceptive. After a dozen of cakewalk missions, you suddenly have much more chaos around you. Now, this is fun, much more than the tutorial levels are. And it is not obscenely hard, even for a non twitch gamer like myself. But players may be caught unaware by how the game changes.

There are three main types of vehicles you can play as. A Mecha, A Tank, and A Hovercraft.

They're all distinctive enough and come with pros and cons to dealing with the levels. As the game progresses you start to see variations on the three core types depending on the weapons they are kitted out with, but the basic types are down to these three.

• Mechas are your stompy robot type familiar to anyone who can automaticly picture a Mecha when they read the word. The top half can aim independently to the legs and they are rather slow. One benefit to legs though is that they can crouch behind cover to avoid enemy fire as they are normally a larger object.
• Tanks move around the same speed but take longer to physically turn and to aim their turret. I generally found them to have harder armour. They have a rush attack where you can just plough right into enemies and buildings to take them out. Just make sure the building is not one that explodes and takes you out with it.
• Hovercraft are smaller, zippy and fast moving, but have a lower amount of health and weapons. They can fly over low level obstacles that the other types would have to smash through or walk around. One benefit of being fast is you can easily strafe enemy attacks.

As said, there's a little more to this. Each vehicle will have different weapon types for primary and secondary fire, and different ammo limits. You can potentially have an hovercraft with highly destructive firepower and in a larger frame, but this will be balanced against your other stats.

Freelance mode has a lot you can unlock using credits to play around with as a type of sandbox.

Additionally each vehicle has a special ability with a timer cooldown, rather than an ammo use. The starting mecha uses smoke bombs to obscure enemy vision, the starting tank has a cloaking shield, and the starting hovercraft can send out a short range EMP burst when things get too crowded for you to handle.

Reading the mission description can give you some idea on what is the best craft to use, but there's little penalty aside from loss of your time if you fail.

The isometric view-field poses the usual problems of this perspective with how tall buildings can be obscured when you need to hit the base. It is fixed and there's no odd parallax happening thankfully. This is rare though, and if you encounter it remember that you are in a bloody death machine and can move to a different angle.

Sights for primary and secondary weapons help to aim though I could just point in the direction and shoot in most cases. Especially with spread based weapons vs fast enemies. An arc line will also show up on anything that has to be launched/thrown.

It does look rather pretty though. Clean urban environments, industrial factories, open farmlands. A fair amount has gone into the art style to make things feel fresh and like they belong in the environs they are set in.

They you are let loose with your guns and rockets. Explosions light up the surrounding area, chaining them together to cause a destructive path of light. Knocking out certain facilities can see the lights go out to various buildings. Organics make tiny little splatters beneath you. Lasers glitter in the dark near the level's exit gate.

And the game's soundtrack is just fantastic and full of synth, I had been listening to it a fair bit before I started playing and still had it on after gaming a fair bit. Normally at this point I'd have some kind of podcast playing as there's no in level story mode aside from a few very rare and obvious popups. But this is awesome, be sure to give it at least a listen on the bandcamp links provided.

This game is fun, and there's very few flaws I had with it. Not something I could marathon through, but running several campaign or freelance missions a day fills that destructive urge.

Well worth a look, the design, presentation are top notch and it is not as fast paced as one may expect from something like this.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (June 2017)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 12 August 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows Vista or later.
Processor: 2.6 GHz or faster
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon 5770 / NVIDIA GTX 460 or better
Storage: 1 GB available space