On the colonial planet of Novo Solo and its chief city-state Solo Nobre, the citizens have endured several years of rule under a statesman known only as the Great Leader. After emancipating the colony from its corporate overlords, the Solo Nobre Concern (or SNC), the Great Leader enacted numerous isolationist policies and worked on improving the general quality of life of the occupants of Solo Nobre. However, the Great Leader is dead - assassinated, perhaps - and the SNC is looking to recoup its investments. Since Solo Nobre has installed multiple orbital guns designed to deter spacebound foes, SNC's best bet is to recruit morally-flexible mercenaries already on the planet to carve out a path for a massive invasion from SNC forces: those known as the Brigadors. It's into this dystopian world of conflict that the player is introduced, slowly picking up on the lore as they complete missions for faceless suits somewhere out in deep space as they trample, explode, shoot down, and otherwise destroy large swathes of Solo Nobre (and the Solo Nobreans) for personal gain.

If Brigador is not lacking for something, it's a sense of aesthetic. A sci-fi universe of warring mechs, tanks, and anti-grav vehicles vying for control of a remote city-state in disarray, all scored to an intense synthwave soundtrack that arrived just as said musical genre was about to see a renaissance with the first season of Stranger Things later in that same summer of 2016. For whatever reason, in my pre-playthrough notes I'd put down Brigador as an RPG in the vein of Harebrained Schemes's BattleTech or a Front Mission: it's very much a pure action game instead, albeit with some tactical considerations regarding pre-mission loadouts, and reminiscent of the isometric mouse-driven action games Bullfrog and Sensible used to put out in the early '90s: Syndicate and Cannon Fodder first and foremost (or, were I a little more versed in mech games, perhaps a Future Cop LAPD?). Prowling an isometric landscape from a greatly zoomed out perspective, the player is tasked with driving their selected vehicle to mission goals and other valuable targets of opportunity - their approximate destinations marked on the boundary of the screen like a compass - and quickly destroying them, earning bonuses for surplus destruction and conditions like incurring only a small amount of damage or never setting off the enemy alarms. The money earned is tallied after a mission - successful or otherwise, though obviously the former pays more - and added to the player's total for future "acquisitions."

Brigador is split into two modes: Campaign and Freelance. I've just been sticking to Campaign for the time being, which has a series of missions with pre-determined loadouts. The first few missions are tutorials for each vehicle type - a mech (all-rounder), a tank (slow but powerful), and an anti-grav car (maneuverable but weak) - and after that are around two dozen missions in which the player has a small assortment of loadouts they can select between: the more challenging a vehicle is to win the map with, the bigger the payout after a successful sortie. From what I've gathered of the Freelance mode, it's where you spend all the money you've accrued to acquire better vehicles, weapons, pilots, and new and more difficult missions to create bespoke challenges for yourself as you work your way through unlocking everything the game has to offer. You can also put that money towards unlocking lore entries on the various proper nouns the mission briefs throw at you, or intel on every vehicle type in the game.

For all its spectacle, Brigador does manage to feel strategic in its approach to certain mission objectives. For one, the weapons you bring are best suited for certain targets, whether that's other enemy units or the structures you have to bring down. If a mission's goal is to destroy some buildings, you'd best bring something along that can do the job and do it well. Some weapons are best at removing shields, which many of the tougher or faster enemies have to soak up damage, while others are suited for removing armor fast through corrosion and high-velocity piercing. Maneuverability might count a great deal in maps with many slow moving heavy-hitters, though if you're expecting heavy resistance it might be prudent to enter the mission in a tank the size of an apartment building (and about as fast to turn around). Different vehicles call for different strategies, and you can use things like volume - certain buildings explode very loudly, and there's only so stealthy you can be with an enormous tank cannon - to your own advantage by drawing enemy hordes into bottlenecks and other ambush-ready zones. Ammo is a frequent concern - you'll sometimes start with none at all - which means keeping an eye on where ammo depots are located, and specifically the ones carrying the sort of ammo your current vehicle uses. Depots are another valuable secondary target though, so you might be inclined to destroy them and reap ammo from fallen enemies instead. Last of all, each vehicle has a cooldown-based support weapon that has effectively infinite use: these might range from non-combat tools like smoke grenades or stealth camo to powerful short-range attacks like a shockwave. They're best employed when you're in trouble, though depending on the vehicle they're often indispensable throughout the mission. It's considerations like these that stop Brigador from feeling too mindless or too repetitive: there's always some wrinkle to address, or some new dynamic that requires some additional ratiocination.

Brigador strikes me as the type of game best suited for shorter intermittent sessions, playing through a scenario or two at a time as a cleanser between games that require more of an investment. That's not to say that Brigador doesn't do a fine job immersing you into its grim corporate-funded universe or that it isn't full of dense worldbuilding to peruse, just that the game's structure - the Freelance mode in particular - feels purpose-built for the same kind of experimentation, slow progress, and frequent failure that you'd enjoy from a run-based game like Into the Breach, Heat Signature, or the many other tactical "roguelites" out there. Currently I think I might just call it a day after the Campaign missions are done - they seem to be the closest thing the game has to a story mode - but I could see myself dropping by for a few Freelance missions every now and then when I find myself in a mood to disintegrate a futuristic city block or two. (NB: Played on PC with the 2017 "Up-Armored" enhanced edition of the game.)

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)