Strange Brigade

 

Strange Brigade is yet another co-op game by Rebellion. The makers of Sniper Elite, Zombie army etc. They keep making all these co-op games, thats not a complaint atleast its more stuff to play

Strange Brigade is a lot of the same forumula of their other games, except this time the twist is that youre playing as like some team of archeologists doing Indiana Jones type expeditions to find treasure or some shit. Right off the bat I gotta say the story and writing and dialogue is just awful, the Narrator in particular constantly is yapping in your ear some really corny stupid "So whimsical! XD"  nonsense in your ear. Luckily theres an option to mostly turn off the narrator dialogue but I suffered through the first couple levels with it on and damn it really takes the immersion out of the game cause hes so stupid.

The game has 12 levels where you and your buddy play through this campaign , the beginning of every level starts almost the exact same. A cutscene of your team sitting inside a Blimp, talking about some bullshit that i couldnt care about, then parachuting in.

The levels are mostly about going through a linear path, walking into a arena, then having to survive for up to 5 minutes as waves of enemies spawn, then you have to go do a puzzle which there is only a few that get copy pasted/repeated over and over. That's the general cycle of the game.

But atleast the combat is fun right?
Well, not really.
You see, this is basically just a reskin of other Rebellion games like Zombie Army. Instead this time, instead of killing zombies, you're basically killing Mummies and other kinds of egyptian melee creatures.

The combat is underwhelming because most of the time, you just stand there spamming bullets without even having to move. Because all the enemies for the most part walk extremely slowly towards you and not much else happens. Sometimes it will throw different kinds of enemies at you, but they dont really function that different. You have skeletons, scorpians, skeletons with armor, and Minotaurs. Theres all sorts of different variations, but they dont feel much different and most of them still walk extremely slowly. Most of them are melee only, but there are times where they spit at you or throw melee objects at you but its nothing to exciting.

So unfortunately the combat is mostly pretty boring actually. It's too slow paced , and the AI doesn't really do anything too exciting. They all happen to be bullet sponges too so you kinda just stand around and shoot in circles for 5 minutes.

There are other mechanics like every so often you can press E to use your amulet which kills a wave of enemies, but other than that its the typical third person controls.

But unfortunately the controls suck, for example, by default Shift throws a grenade. Really stupid. Also, you cant sprint manually, you just sprint automatically after holding W for long enough. You also cant shoot without aiming down your gun, the controls just dont feel great. It has Spacebar to roll and dodge like Dark Souls or something, and I even think it gives invinciiblity frames, so you spend a lot of time just spamming Roll constantly but it just feels cheap and stupid.

Graphically the game is hit or miss too. The game is very much Brown n Bloom where most of the enviornments is just dull overly saturated, overly constrated Yellow landscapes. The color grading/brightness in the game just seems messed up cause it looks washed out and over exposed. Even without it, the graphics don't look all that impressive. Like they're not bad, but something is off. The general tone and artstyle as well is pretty lame , especially with the narrator and the whole game tries to take a comicbook goofy undertone but I just found it offputting.

The game has a really half assed weapon upgrade system and weapon unlocks
So as you kill enemies and go around the levels, you collect gold, you use gold to buy new guns after each mission. But the thing is, since this is basically a reskin of Sniper Elite/Zombie Army, why would you want to use Rifles? I dont want it to play exactly like those games, so of course I want to use different guns like machine guns and stuff. Well the proble mis theres barely any selection of guns. The game has like 5 machine guns, if that, a few shotguns, and a few rifles. And to make matters worse, they cost insane amounts of gold that you can really only unlock 2/3 of them per ENTIRE playthrough. Thats right, I was only able to unlock like two guns for the entire playthrough.

Ontop of it, the guns feel shitty. Like the machine guns shoot extremely slowly it just feels off. Now, you can 'upgrade' weapons, and to do so, you need 'Gems'. The problem is, gems apparently only spawn randomly in chests, mostly after doing optimal puzzles. Now, the issue is, more than halfway through the game and We didnt find a single one of these fucking gems, so just bad RNG or what? The general item system is terrible and not rewarding. Towards the end of the game we finally found a few gems and got a few upgrades, but it didnt even feel that differnet or worth it. Very meh.

So like I said previosuly the game has really annoying pacing issues. What I mean is its never just like GOGOGO its like Go, stop, go, stop, go , stop. By stop I mean, you finish killing enemies, then you have to mindlessly look around the enviornment for 10 mins looking for some stupid blue orb to shoot, or do some bad puzzle. The game has serious trouble keeping momentum, to where it starts to be annoying and feel like  a chore. Sure, some of the puzzles are kinda entertaining, like connecting the pipes or shooting the correct order, but they get copy pasted so much or they're so tedious that it just ruins the pacing.
And ontop of it, when you do get combat, its also kinda mindless where the enemies are so slow and so abundant, you kinda just stand still spamming bullets for 10 mins without any real threat.

The game has a few boss fights, but its kinda just the same big Minotaur guy over and over where you just shoot a few blue parts on him, then hold Mouse1 until hes dead. Its a welcome change of pace, but not incredible or anything.

Towards the end of the game the difficulty starts to ramp up, naturaly, but what that means is basically you just get gigantic swarms of enemies like hundreds at once where you just enter these Survival arenas for 10 minutes at a time as it throws all sorts of minotaurs and stuff at you. Yeah its kinda more entertaining and challenging, but still it just drags on and gets tedious. By the end of the game I was just begging for it to be over, getting upset when I realized there was a few more missions. Not a good sign

The game isnt overall terrible, its a co-op game you can play with a buddy, its a shooter game, its got decent graphics, but the overall corny forced whimsical tone, the annoying dialogue and generic characters, the incredibly meh boring combat, the bad weapon system, the bad boring AI and objectives just make it not a great game by any means. Probably one of the worst games in the Rebellion co-op series, id much rather play Zombie army or Sniper elite series. This one feels like a lazy reskin

5/10