New Strange Brigade trailer offers comprehensive gameplay overview

Rebellion has released a comprehensive trailer of its upcoming co-op shooter Strange Brigade, which launches later this month.

The six-minute video provides a full overview of the game’s key features, detailing enemies, player abilities, weapons, and more.

Inspired by classic adventure fiction, Strange Brigade sees up to four players joining forces as a group of early twentieth-century explorers. Together, they “explore ancient civilisations” and “unearth astonishing artefacts”, which is a nice way of saying they plunder tombs.

The new video starts by offering some story context for Strange Brigade’s cooperative shenanigans. The Brigade’s primary mandate is to investigate the disappearance of several noted archaeologists, while battling an undead army controlled by Seteki the Witch Queen (officially the worst kind of queen). Players will fight mummies, undead assassins, giant scorpions, and skeleton pirates, amongst others.

The trailer also reveals more information about Strange Brigade's playable characters, each of whom has access to unique supernatural abilities. Masai Warrior Nalangu Rushida can “drain the very life from her foes”, for example, which is a little odd given most of her foes are dead to begin with. “Hardy lass” Gracie Braithwaite can fling enemies into the air before bringing them crashing down, while “renowned archaeologist” Archimedes de Quincy can, um, turn enemies into chickens.

I reckon Strange Brigade’s success will mainly come down to how well it nails its theme. There are reasons to be optimistic, such as how the game’s action is described as you play by a plum-mouthed narrator (who also does a fine job of voicing the trailer, incidentally). Yet while the trailer shows off lots of fun little gimmicks, I’m concerned that it lacks a deeper central system to bind the cooperative play together.

I do like that Strange Brigade gives a little nod Rebellion's Sniper Elite series, in the form of party character Frank Fairburne. I really hope he’s Karl Fairburne’s dad. If Frank has an ability that lets him shoot zombies in the crotch, we’ll know for certain.

Strange Brigade will be fighting an ancient curse near you as of August 28th.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.