I write to you from a friend's living room. This is maybe the third time I've started this post - the first time I was in a (pretty shit) cafe, where I remembered that I still have issues to sort out re: feeling self-conscious about doing writing in public, while the next attempt was at the kitchen table of a different friend on the other side of Melbourne to where I sit now. The point I wish to not-so-cleverly communicate is that I'm on the move again, the vagary of conditions of being mobile and staying with friends slightly less conducive to mouse and keyboard games like, pertinent example, Brigador, which this here blog post is (a little superficially) about. I should add that even though I didn't bring a mouse with me, there is definitely a mouse here that I could borrow (sitting right in front of me, in fact. Should I take a photo? No), and that it wouldn't be too hard to temporarily shift e.g. the stationary, tobacco, textbooks (but probably not the 1000 piece puzzle which if not finished seems very close to it), move this laptop from my actual lap and onto the table, plug in and play. But I'm starting to realise how much gaming is a hobby of domestic interior comfort for me. The space comes first, then the habit. Arguably/ideally it should be the other way around.
Sometimes life chooses when you're finished with the game - is a thing I wanted to write, leaning into the wince, extra helpings of cheese, melodrama leaking down my face, although even then it’s a painful simplification. It's more that mix of circumstance with the self-determined pressure of like, how long you should spend on any one game in a dumb myopic self-indulgent project versus an ongoing desire to slip in diary snippets while making it first and foremost about the game and also, like, not getting bogged down in personal shit. With Brigador I had, back in Canberra, almost - ! - finished the campaign, anyway, though a bit of last-minute research told me this whole campaign mode that I'd been playing was a more recent addition (the 2017 "up-armoured" part, in fact) to the game, and is kinda meant as a large tutorial section to the game proper, which is (I think) a freelance, permadeathy, scores and upgrades situation. Silly me for assuming.
Brigador is a - here, do you like descriptors specific to videogames and nothing else? - cyberpunk isometric bullet-hell mech shootybanger. You WASD your mech around the map, mouse-aiming at specific targets and enemy mechs/infantry while trying to not get blown up. The mechs can be slow and clunky, fast and fragile, with a few different weapon options and special abilities. It's set on a planet (I think?) called Solo Nobre, where there are lots of factions and loyalties and uh... I don't know. There was a lot of competently written flavour text for each mission. I dutifully read all of it but I wouldn't know how to go about paraphrasing the narrative (if there is any).
At a systems level though Brigador is, like, surprisingly solid. Fuck it. I’ll say it. It’s good. It’s a good game. It's endearingly simple, utterly mindless fun. The mechs aren't much to look at, but they have a real sense of weight to them - the heavy ones are almost painfully slow, while the lighter ones float effortlessly across the grid. There's enough control and tactical variability there that you could get quite a lot of mileage out of it; I found the heavy mechs with big guns generally easier to pass missions with, while I suspect the stealthy and/or zippy ones might take a bit more practice to use without meeting certain failure. Every building, wall, barrier in the game is destructible, which is a bit gimmicky but also, good. Also, the cannon fire is backed by some really decent clattering sound effect work, while the industrial synth backing track escalates in tempo as the pewpew gets hectic.
It doesn't seem like much to look at, at first, with a weird mixture of repeating doodads, lo-fi polygon shapes with newer engine textures making it seem like it belonged to no particular place and time. But even this I came around to. There's a restrained but wonderful use of neon/fluoro, against the ever drab industrial backgrounds. I quite liked the shadowy, half-lit streets and the renditions of retro-future industry, even while it was difficult to see the neighbourhoods and commercial districts that dotted the game’s story as anything other than open-plan mazes with a few illuminated but-otherwise-meaningless targets.
To be in Brigador is to be passing a moment just fine. And that's kind of about it. That's about it with a lot of games, I guess, although there's a purity of having basically-nothing-else present here. Nothing to think about. I think, particularly when I started to struggle with some of the longer missions, sometimes insta-killing my mech by driving into an unseen gas-station or similar (some of these are not well marked) right at the end of the mission and thereby having to repeat the whole thing again, swearing at the computer and the game and myself but also not really caring, I felt a heightened awareness of the futility of all this which, yeah, is nothing new, but I mainly only feel it when I play shittier, less altogether well-glued games than this one. Like, what is the point, actually? Brigador is functionally excellent; a pretty effective waste of time. How many times can I come to this particular conclusion about a game? For the lifetime of this blog.
When/Where: Brigador: Up Armoured Edition was in the June 2017 Humble Monthly. This is the first time a game from Humble Monthly has come up, I think, and it's also coincidentally from the first Monthly I got (after a long time of being like, no, that’s stupid). I think the carrot here was Stellaris, which predictably I still haven't had a proper go with, a year later.
Who: It was developed by Stellar Jockeys [official site], a four-man team across Illinois and Washington State (I know where these places are because America is everything even though I've never been there, hi). The game originally hit early access in 2015, full market in 2016, and the Up-Armoured re-release was June 2017 (same time as it was bundled with the monthly).
Duration: I played it for...7 hours. I unlocked 6 out of 63 achievements (wow so few) and one of those was for accidentally opening the console.
up next is Broken Age, beginning a run of adventure games being four of the next five in the list. Expect interrupted business as always.
