Brigador Killers

I played the original brigador a whole bunch and I've had this game on my wishlist since it was announced almost ten years ago. When I saw it release into EA, it was an instant buy. I played for about an hour and just exited the game in utter disappointment. The tutorial missions felt like a good balance of the old frantic brigador mech combat, and the on-foot sequences were a little janky (but hey it's EA), then you get unceremoniously dropped into a set of dark tunnels and are kicking and punching and throwing rocks for the first several missions. When you get guns you never have enough ammo; and even when you do you have to burn a whole clip to kill one guy. Add to that early enemies that are basically small mech robots that take a gazillion rounds to destroy (but inexplicably die from like 5 kicks/punches), that also constantly stunlock, and hordes of regular enemies that are instantly triggered the moment you fire a round, and of course have unlimited ammo. I had to restart the same few early missions multiple times (while losing all of my gear on each failed run each time) to attempt to scrounge up enough ammo to actually use my firearms, which still felt incredibly underwhelming, to the point where it was often easier to just punch/kick everything for more damage and to preserve my precious little ammo. Really though, none of these complaints are things the other negative reviews aren't already saying, huge difficulty spikes, lack of vehicular combat, and an EA release that feels significantly different from what they featured in their demo. It almost feels like a completely different team made this game then the ones that made Brigador all those years ago, and hey, it's been almost a decade, it probably is. I refunded this and will continue to check it out over the coming months to see if the devs can salvage this into something that's more fun (in my opinion). I worry that because the reception has been so bad at release (63% at time of writing meaning mixed status), the massive delay from the release of the first game to this one, and the relative niche of this type of game, unless the studio has some kind of warchest to fall back on and go heads-down on fixes, it's going to be really difficult to turn things around and fund this game to completion. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this will be one of the few turnaround stories in the industry. If that happens I will happily re-buy, but I don't have faith this will get to that point after seeing how many other games ended on the scrap heap when they've debuted this poorly with their core demographic.