Brigador is the ultimate end result of a game saying "what if we just let the player play the game" and making a series of enormous toyboxes for you to stomp, drive, float, and shoot through like some fucked up crossover between the Dukes of Hazzard and Godzilla. The game reeks of absolute style and a lot of work clearly went into the gamefeel of being an unstoppable menace.

You aren't just invincible, of course, and many levels present interesting challenges of combat or stealth or sheer speed that keep you from getting complacent. In the levels with large amounts of resistance, the collateral damage system of the game truly shines the brightest as shrapnel, wreckage, and debris scatter across exploding fields of bullets and lasers as you stomp and dash through buildings and hedgerows with reckless abandon. Delightfully, the game's missions award extra payouts based on how much collateral is caused, so there is not only no penalty for engaging in the most fun part of the game, but direct encouragement to set up chaotic nightmare battles.

There's only one singular mark I have against this game, and that is that it seems extremely reluctant to truly escalate the scenarios appropriately to your own performance as a player - either your mistakes are met with immense, overwhelming resistance as every enemy on the map zeroes in on you like sharks smelling blood, or there is barely anything that happens of consequence. This means the harder levels feel a bit more like a precision platformer where I need to execute very specific orders of operations to avoid instant death, and in other levels it creates a sense of unopposed aimlessness.

Brigador is an unfolding tactical lotus that is always hiding something. At first, it hides unit types, and weapon synergies, and lore, and those other kinds of mechanical things. Once those mechanical things are exhausted, Brigador begins to unfold how it's supposed to be played. There are suggestions, ideas, a "feel" of an intended gameplay experience, but Brigador continuously removes smaller and smaller training wheels and begs the player to ask "Okay, but what if I just full fucking send it?" with a wider and wider spreading of mechapunk murderdeath. Every time you thing you've found Brigador's intention, the lotus opens again and you realize you could have been doing better the whole time.

With this in mind, the game is built not to be a mecha twin-stick shooter, or a tactical stealth game, but as a sandbox. Brigador is a sandbox with a very specific kind of sand in a very specific kind of box. Can you only build the biggest sand castles with quiet, tactical, high-risk, and high-precision stealth builds? Yes. But as long as it involves shooting robots in 3ish dimensions, you can spin Brigador to make it happen.

Brigador's constant lotusing and unfolding start buckling at higher difficulties, though, and it can only go so far. The 'correct' way to play Brigador is whatever way is the most fun, but the 'best' way is stealth. While this has no meaningful consequence in Freelance (due to how silly payout scaling is with certain pilot/vehicle combos), it's hard to cope with in Campaign mode. Is that a skill/personal issue? Mostly, yes, but it also means the later you get into the campaign a player gets, the more the game zooms in on high-risk low-reward stealth play. It's not a terrible place to end up in; Brigador always has an undercurrent of tactical stress. There's simply a loss of player expression in the later campaign that the rest of the game doesn't struggle with.