In the original Brigador, you played a mercenary mech pilot dropped onto the corporate autocratic colony world of Novo Solo. In the cockpit of a multi-story death machine, you could carve an easy path through the space colony’s buildings and defenders. If they were to put up any fight against you, it was by amassing in great numbers.
The tables are turned in Brigador Killers; you’re part of the hit team seeking revenge for the massacre on Novo Solo. But, instead of being armed with a two-story mech, I had to make do with a tuk-tuk.
While the first game played like a twin-stick shooter, with you piloting your mech through a linear campaign of destructive levels that looked like Syndicate, Brigador Killers has a lot more of that Bullfrog classic’s DNA. Missions take place in sandbox cities, where your objectives are wrapped in layers of corporate security. You might have to target a former mech pilot who now lives behind the high walls of a luxury apartment block, or who only drives around town in an armoured car. To get at them, you’ll need to collect equipment in other missions that can get around their protections.
As you can find from the new demo on Steam, Brigador Killers is more of a sandbox game than the original. You start with nothing in your home base, just a jobs board and a ruined vehicle gantry. However, by taking low level missions, such as ripping off local gangs of their arms shipment, you can find the weapons, explosives, and vehicles you need to start hitting the brigadors where they live. Literally.
From what I’ve played of the demo, the shift in genre is ambitious and also a perfect fit for the detailed isometric cities of the original game.The cars and people who milled about in Brigador, seemingly only existing to flee before the destruction of your mech, now they make the metropolis feel alive. When you open fire on a gang member with your shotgun, people still flee, but now other gang members will run toward the scene, or worse the police. Frisk their bodies and you’ll find guns, ammo, and maybe a bandage or two. You can enter every car, too, making a quick escape back to base if you need to. Any vehicle you take home can be stripped for parts to upgrade your other vehicles, or you can simply tune it up and take it back into your next mission.
There are clumsinesses to the controls and how you interact with the world, and there are bugs too (I had two three hard crashes in the demo), but considering I made my escape from one mission in a tuk-tuk, running down a mercenary in the process, I’m willing to forgive the rough edges at the moment and simply look forward to this sequel.
What I really want to see is how these new systems build. Will Brigador Killers feel like lots of disjointed missions in a single cyberpunk city, or will it play like I’m building a coherent insurgency across a sustained campaign?
