Brigador: Up-Armored Edition

Very fun VERY easy on the ears and eyes game. The setting and how it's world building is presented just grabbed me and wouldn't let go. Less of a Story and more of a Setting to Make Stories.

Really grows on you.

I rate Brigador: Up-Armored Edition 3.5/5. Pretty good overall. Brigador is a third person, isometric, top-down perspective, armored urban-combat game which lets you control a wide variety of ground-based vehicles including small bikes, hover cars, hover tanks, treaded tanks and walking tanks. The game’s impressive variety of vehicles ranges from motorcycle-sized to building-sized. Despite the game’s distant, aerial perspective, Brigador’s usually tight urban combat is brutal, unforgiving and horrific featuring extensive collateral damage and many gory civilian casualties (though the various gory combat incidents are always kept far away from your distant perspective and so appear tiny and, to the player, insignificant). Despite a wide variety of vehicles to control and a huge number of different missions to play, Brigador’s biggest downside is how repetitive its gameplay can become. What makes Brigador pretty good: + The environments are highly destructible and this drastically increases Brigador’s sense of grittiness and horror. The game’s seemingly amoral, detached and distant aerial perspective causes the urban mechanized combat in this game to feel even more chilling. The weapons you have in Brigador are extremely powerful and the battle areas are fairly dense, urban environments. Miss your target in the midst of fast-paced combat and your shots will cause significant collateral damage and may presumably cause many civilian deaths. Battles in Brigador often reduce entire city blocks to flattened, blackened rubble in seconds and nearly all buildings, trees, vehicles and people in the battle area can be pulverized. I did think it was odd that no fires ever broke out though and there were no moving civilian vehicles in the streets (all the vehicles appear to have been abandoned). + A wide variety of weapons and vehicles can eventually be unlocked and used in freelance mode and they are all fun to try at least once though some are far more useful than others. + Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is a very long game with a huge amount of content. I played it for roughly 70 hours in total. It features numerous campaign missions and even more of the far more fun, far more open-ended freelance mode missions (which are based off of the campaign mode missions but which (once you manage to unlock them all) allow you to choose whatever character (aka: difficulty), weapon loadout and vehicle you want to use for each mission. + Brigador also has many fun and interesting game options which don’t necessarily prevent steam achievements from being awarded (contrary to what the game warns). I was able to get steam achievements for completing campaign missions even with the invisibility cheat menu option turned on. You can also dramatically slow down the speed at which the game moves, allowing you to play entire battles in slow-motion if you wish; useful if fast-paced, chaotic action isn’t your thing. + Fairly low system requirements. + No bugs whatsoever. I noticed no problems, hiccups or slow downs whatsoever. Brigador worked perfectly. What’s mediocre about Brigador: +/- While the graphics are quite detailed, they are also quite small on my 1920 by 1080 resolution screen and there is no actual way to zoom in and out on the little details in the game world. I also wished I had some sort of ground-level or zoomed in replay mode so I could watch my battles from the perspective of the little people on the ground. The combat in Brigador often felt as though it had a sort of Kaiju monster movie aspect to it (vaguely like the old Rampage Kaiju arcade game) which was never fully realized. +/- The controls can be hard to get used to at first but once you do they’ll eventually feel quite intuitive. The controls are extremely responsive and all keys can be easily rebound. +/- Certain missions in the main campaign can be incredibly frustrating which is what lead me to try out the invisibility cheat option I mentioned above. It is good these game designers realized how frustrating some of their main campaign missions can be and so included the occasionally useful and fun cheat options. What’s bad about Brigador: -Brigador barely has a story and what story it does have is amoral and largely irrelevant, serving as a shallow excuse to allow you, the player, to eventually use any of the game’s vehicles to fight against any of the game’s enemies in any of the game’s environments. -There is no spoken dialogue. There are no alternate endings. There are no plot decisions to be made. The game’s “story” entirely takes the form of mission briefings and weapon and vehicle and character files to be unlocked and read between missions. -Brigador’s unlockable files do feature a lot of world-building but the derivative, dark, amoral cyberpunk world they describe isn’t very interesting. -To make matters worse, the game’s “characters” are functionally the same as different difficulty level presets. Want to make the game easier or harder? You must choose to play as a different character. Tying difficulty to the use of different characters is a questionable and bizarre design choice which prevents you from ever being allowed to become attached to any particular character, even if you wanted to be. -Brigador’s terrain is very flat. There are no significant hills, mountains, deep rivers or lakes to deal with. Buildings are never extremely tall. There’s usually a lot of buildings around but they’re never skyscrapers. This makes the game feel odd sometimes and makes the gameplay even more repetitive. - The peppy, happy-go-luckly, upbeat techno music not only gets repetitious but also severely detracts from the game’s sense of grittiness and brutal, horrific combat. Brigador has one of the most inappropriately chosen soundtracks I have ever heard in any game. Before long, I turned the music volume all the way down and began playing different music from a music player (MusicBee) on my desktop (occasionally accessing it by using the Windows key to force the Windows start menu to become visible even when whole the game was in full screen mode (which happily did not disrupt the game)). - Needing to unlock items for use in freelance mode is an irritating and artificial-feeling game design decision. I would prefer everything the game has to offer be unlocked by default so I can play around with it as much or as little as I wish. Being effectively forced into completing missions with difficult-to-use and fragile vehicles to get big payoffs (to avoid having to grind for money by playing really long missions with reasonable vehicles) is not extremely fun. Thankfully, I was able to effectively make huge amounts of in-game money fairly quickly by playing a certain, relatively easy mission (the late-game mission where all you have to do is destroy one heavy Corvid tank) with certain fragile vehicles (using certain ones which pay out with a 50x multiplyer) repeatedly (equipped with the sonic cannon vehicle ability). - Brigador: Up-Armored Edition gets repetitive and it does so before you’ve unlocked everything. Every mission is merely about blowing stuff up. The different types of vehicles and weapons and enemies add variety but if you play this game you’ll want to also play other games on the side to break the monotony. -There is no penalty for killing civilians and causing collateral damage to civilian buildings. Indeed, your monetary rewards slightly increase the more damage you do and the more civilians you massacre. While the background plot may be amoral overall (at best), Brigador slightly rewards you with a mild amount of monetary gain for being outright evil, gently encouraging you to commit atrocities against unarmed civilians.