Your intrepid heroes seek direction, play with crotch lights, and stomp all the things. Brigador faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Brigador
Webzone: store.steampowered.com
Devel: Stellar Jockeys / Gausswerks
Engine: In-house custom, C++-based
Price: €17.99 / US$19.99 / CDN$21.99
Wazzat: Brigador is an isometric mech action game full of intense, tactical combat. Fight your way through the streets of Solo Nobre in a 21 mission story campaign as well as a free play mode with endless variety.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
J-
P-
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- Remember games from the 90’s?
- The ones with bitching splash screen and in-game graphics that have fk and all to do with it?
- Colour palette consists of brown.
J-
- It doesn’t actually look too bad. The explodey bits are pretty satisfying
- Soundtrack got noped really quickly’
P-
- The only bit of “voice acting” I heard was the garbly Text-to-Speech voice.
- Isometric camera view and nothing else.
- Slightly less pixely than usual but still very much retro hipster.
- I am not impressed.
Total-
Control
V-
- One of two things are said when first playing the game
- 1. Nope, FK this.
- 2. What!?
- Crotch mounted turning light.
J-
- Literally Controls like a butt
- Also, don’t try to play it with a controller. You will fail.
P-
- For all my usual spiels about mechanics being the most important bit of a video game, mechanics are only as good as the way the player interfaces with them.
- And that interfacing relies almost exclusively on how a game controls. Mouse & keyboard, game controller, and so on.
- In this game, the controls are completely batty nuggets.
- Who did they have on as testers that didn’t flip them off the moment they sat down with this?
- If I want to make the Mechwarrior style mechs at least manageable I have to keep holding down E and even then, I can’t use the left and right inputs to strafe in those directions.
- Why wasn’t this a toggle?
- When you had it enabled it would steer with the mouse, like any sane game of this genre would.
- And when you had it disabled it would do the double orientation thing.
- Having the latter as default and not giving people an option to switch in most mechs is completely asinine.
- I played an hour of this game and I couldn’t physically force myself to play any more because of the controls, but more on that later.
- I can’t give it 1 chair, since it at least lets me play it with the Mistress if I set it to keyboard and mouse mode.
Total-
FUN
V-
- Isometric WASD shooter disguised as a MECH game.
J-
- Honestly, I’d be tempted to give this a two or three chairs for this category, if the controls didn’t suck so much ass
- Seriously. Controls are one of the few parts of the game that you have to get at least passably right. And you didn’t
- You had a neat concept, some cool gameplay, none of which I can engage with whilst fighting the rock stupid control scheme.
- Nice try guys, but no cigar
P-
- Sit down kids, Pedro’s Gaming History lesson is on!
- In 1998, imo the best year in videogaming history, Future Cop L.A.P.D. came out.
- That game was awesome! Admittedly, I was only 12 at the time, so I may have a pretty thick pair of nostalgia glasses going for it.
- When I saw Brigador come out on Steam, I thought “Hey! Hipster pixel LAPD! I want some of that.”
- So I shot Stellar Jockeys an email asking for keys and the moment I got them I went in all hyped up.
- My thoughts at the time were something like “Oh! It’s a fixed isometric camera… “ “Why am I moving left when I press forward?” “Did I miss a toggle to set movement relative to the mouse? No… It’s just stupid by design.” “I can’t be the only one who thinks this is stupid, lemme check the Steam forums.” “Oh, okay! The devs are attempting to justify this decision.”
- How skewed a vision do you have to have, to think this is not only a decent control scheme for a game but to actively defend it when people start complaining about it?
- A game lives or dies, again in my opinion, based on its mechanics.
- But I can’t even get a grasp on the mechanics you have in play when I’m actively fighting the controls.
- It feels wrong to play this game.
Total-
Final –
