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Brigador Killers' demo has one of my new favorite videogame tutorials: You control a giant rolling pinball of a mech as it rolls down a long corridor, a ghostly computer voice urging you on. "YOUR PEOPLE KILLED FOR PROFIT," it declares. "TAKE WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU."
You're then let loose in a bustling city center to level buildings like a reverse Katamari. This cathartic act of sci-fi political violence then zooms out to another terrorist cell watching it go down on the news. Their (your) timetable just moved up.
I've been Brigador-curious for a long time, but playing its sequel's demo has accelerated my own timetable for checking out the 2016 isometric mech shooter. I know the gist of it: You play as immoral mercenaries intervening in a future war on behalf of what are probably the bad guys.
Playing through the demo's assassination story missions, I had to look it up, and yep: Your targets are several playable pilots and the mission control from Brigador 1. I don't need the hours of investment in the story and world I'll soon have to already know that's hard as fuck.
Brigador Killers is brash, transgressive, and stylish. It shares the first game's pre-rendered, Command & Conquer-but-more-cyberpunk art and boasts a follow up to its Makeup & Vanity Set soundtrack to seal the deal. The demo consists of an appetizer assortment of story missions, plus a shockingly generous slice of a sandbox mode—both hold a lot of promise.
After the playable intro, most of the story missions with the main crew are on foot. They felt like bite-size Hitman missions, sort of like how the opening beach level in World of Assassination or the carnival in Blood Money were a little on-rails, a little wearing kid gloves to ease you into things. The presentation, audacity, and escalation really sells it, though.
I love the story mission where you call your target on a payphone to open him up for a sniper shot. A mission where you drive a van full of explosives into a mansion is followed by another where you wait for your target in a turret emplacement, introducing vehicles into the mix. The final mission: A classico mech assault, this time with a gun-toting bipedal walker.
Having on-foot and mech gameplay in the same package—and doing both well—is one of my most rarely-fulfilled gaming wishes, because it really sells the scale and destructive capability of a mech to contrast it with a squishy, puny human.
That bit of story campaign is a fleeting amuse-bouche, but there's a ton of game hidden elsewhere in the demo. "The Garage," in contrast with the story-heavy, relatively gameplay-light campaign, is all action and resource management. It's a sandbox where you deploy to maps extraction-style, looking for ammo, vehicles, parts, everything a budding partisan or mercenary warlord could need.
The first mission you get in The Garage feels like a proof of concept for Brigador Killers' gameplay, a style of open-ended, immersive sim-adjacent mission design that reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 5 or Armored Core 6.
You start at one end of a junkyard, on-foot and armed with a shotgun and SMG. At the other end, a little jalopy that doesn't even have the horsepower to run dudes over waits next to a crate with your 'Lil Mercenary's Starter Kit.
You don't have enough ammo to kill all of the guards in the scrapyard, so you have to determine the best combo of stealth, gunplay, scavenged weaponry, and just legging it to win the day. Unlike the seasoned fighters of the campaign missions, your Garage guy is kinda squishy, and the high-stakes, quick time-to-kill gunplay is tense and rewarding.
Blowing up a whole squad of dudes with one grenade was a moment of triumph made all the sweeter by the preceding attempt where my grenade ricocheted back and killed me—a blunder so funny, I couldn't even get mad.
Brigador Killers seriously whips, it's already sending me back to check out the first game, and this demo offers a shockingly generous amount of mech action: You could wring a dozen hours of gameplay out of the Garage's 17 maps, were you so inclined. But I've already got a whole game to catch up on before Brigador Killers' TBD release.
Until then, you can check out the demo for yourself and wishlist Brigador Killers on Steam. The original game, meanwhile, is on sale for $6.50 on Steam until May 11.
