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.

An absolute delight in just about every way. A treat to look at, listen to, and interact with. The lore is a light touch and provides little more than the barest context, but the pilots themselves have enough character in their little profile pictures and mech loadouts that you kind of get everything you need even if you just play through as big monke. I'm never ever going to listen to the audiobook to find out exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing, but with gamefeel, visual and sound design, and a soundtrack of this immaculate quality, present me with an escalating series of mechs and a proportionally escalating series of cities to destroy and I'm a happy man.

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.

Kann man sich mal anschauen und anspielen, es ist aber – abgesehen von den fantastischen Zerstörungsmöglichkeiten der Gebäude – nichts Besonderes.

Hübsch explodierende Pixeloptik auf die Augen gleicht den Rest nur bedingt aus, auf 100 % hatte ich dann keine Lust mehr, obwohl ich alles im Arsenal freigeschaltet habe. Die Geschichte wird dort beinahe komplett über recht eintönige Datenbank-Texteinträge erzählt, die meist Hintergrundinformationen enthalten. Immerhin macht die Musik gut Laune aufs Herumballern!

Am Ende wird es extrem schwer, was ich nicht wirklich gut fand. Denn die Entwickler haben sogar direkt in die normalen Spieleinstellungen mehrere Cheat-Möglichkeiten eingebaut, welche ich dann auch ausgiebig nutzen musste. Schade, dass man ein Spiel so gestalten muss.

Achievements: 90 %

Brigador is an isometric shooter which boasts an impressive selection of bipedal mechs, tanks and anti-gravity vehicles which can be outfitted with an equally impressive lineup of weapons which range from antitank guns and machine guns to more exotic choices such as lasers and corrosive gas.
It's important to note that this isn't a twin stick shooter, it can be controlled like one, but it's not recommendable. Tank controls are superior for more advanced play because vehicles tend to be vulnerable from the back and mounted weapons usually can't rotate 360°. This probably contributed to the game's lukewarm initial reception, but it adds much needed depth to the combat.
The bulk of the game's content are freelance missions which consist on procedural generated mercenary contracts of different length that usually involve the destruction of something as the main objective. The environments in Brigador are completely destructible and collateral damage is rewarded, it also facilitates certain tactics such as blowing up an apartment building to create a nice choke point. There's also a risk-reward system with harder difficulty pilots and crappier vehicles awarding more money at the end of a mission.
Finally, I would be amiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack. It's one of the greatest synth soundtracks in gaming and fits the game very well.
To conclude, Brigador is great and you should play it. I would recommend it to everyone who can stomach the controls.