Brigador: Up-Armored Deluxe

It's fun and the soundtrack is pretty good as well, pretty good product, enough said

I got this game for free; it certainly isn't worth a $30 price tag. People comparing it unfavorably to Battletech or Mechwarrior are attempting to compare disposable razors to combine harvesters. It's a fun little arcade style "destroy everything" game, and it's certainly no challenge to destroy everything on a map. In fact, that's probably the biggest downfall: there is no challenge to this game once you master the somewhat odd steering mechanism (the devs call it "WASD", but it does not perform as you'd expect from that description, and the driving mechanic could literally have been operated by ANY four keys--using W, A, S and D confuses the issue because this is not played like an FPS). The game takes minutes to master, and after that there's really no challenge no matter what you do. The AI simply isn't capable of doing tremendous damage to you, but YOU are to it. You can infinitely replay any mission, and the maps and AI loadouts for each are always the same, so the "roguelite" description is completely inappropriate. Customization is non-existent, you graduate to slightly more capable war machines, but loadouts for each are not customizable, and you can't choose among "unlocked" mechs, you're simply assigned one for each mission. You earn igc for everything you do, but it's not clear what you're meant to spend this on, as there are no options you can purchase. There's no real story, just a static graphical NPC face and text "explaining" something about a revolution, and you work for... well, it's not clear whether you work for the government or the rebellion, but again the goal of the game is to destroy everything. Trying to discern a logical plot in this is probably a complete waste of time. Graphics are fairly decent, but don't expect photo-realism or even anything "modern" looking because this looks like an arcade console game from about 2001.

Brigador is one of those very few games that dares to experiment, managed to find it's niche and slowly got patched to perfection. If you liked Future Cop LAPD but always thought "Man, i wished there was more wanton violence and demolition in my mech game!" then please look no further. Update support has been top-notch with repeated "Ok, we added a ton of vehicles, maps and mod tools. But this is it!" patches being dropped as recently as the end of 2021. Even if the developers would stop supporting this game you won't hear complaints from me about the attention the devs gave it. (EA and Ubisoft, are you listening?)

At time of writing, the deluxe edition is on 57% off, a steal for the game and the audiobook both. Stellar gameplay, amazing visuals and animations with a unique and distinct lore that transitions seamlessly between audiobook and game. I genuinely have nothing to complain about, thank you to MandaloreGaming for raising awareness for this title.

Cool Game and OST. If you like violence and mechs, buy this.