Quick Look: Strange Brigade

Given that its in-game name is "Thompkins" and that there's anachronistic filigree and etchings all over it, I think we can safely assume that the gun is "Generic Fantasy Gun #3,468".

Not seeing a lot about this game to love. Glacial auto fire speed, overly arcadey shooting and animation work that reminds me of third person shooters from the mid 2000s, unshared loot that incentivizes rushing ahead as well as dicking over the people who solved the puzzles, and a tired colonialist aesthetic that doesn't really do anything to justify itself.

@sasnake: Man, do you just actively look for opportunities to separate a reaction from a subject?

Sorry to throw shade, but you're repeating a point straight out of 2014 and if you took the time you spent reading the comments to consider why they might have an issue with them, then the reasoning behind why should be pretty clear. You don't have to agree with them or anything, just don't be dismissive if someone talks about problems within a game. Peace.

Aside from the colonial stuff, I think the game is a neat idea, and I like some of the designs and concepts around dungeon-delving and puzzle solving (seriously, a Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light mixed with L4D-style co-op would be rad as heck), but boy do I hate the way this game moves and the way the weapons shoot. Seems like they wanted to limit the player DPS, but they did it by making all of the guns sound/feel wimpy af with no sense of impact for the player or the enemies. Loot goblin issues are a shame, too.

First, I enjoyed the vid. Second, I think there are some tone problems with the game. I get that "head hunter" is the cutesy name for the head shot award, but seeing that under Brad's character is a bad look. Oh, and for anybody who thinks I'm calling the devs bigots or whatever, I'm not. I'm calling them lazy and a touch thoughtless. If you're making a product with this aesthetic, you have a responsibility to think through your shit. We can all do better for each other.

i also think the game is neat apart from the colonial stuff

but as soon as they said british in egypt i was like smdh

i didnt exactly have a trigger seizure, but they should stick to nazis, makes for more cut and dried morality.

I appreciate that there's a trophy called 'Get Down, Shep!'

None more British.

DON'T point out the social and historical context of aesthetics deployed by the games being played

but DO request that the people in the stream dial back their self-expression to cater to your taste!

No, it's not. I'd contend that it isn't even "probably racist." It's playing with pulp fiction motifs from the 1930s that don't conform to the "enlightened" stances and standards of 2010s internet culture (and how could these motifs do so, coming 80 years prior?), but that doesn't make it racist. Now if this game continually denigrated non-European peoples and promoted a belief of European supremacy over all other peoples, then you'd have a case. If the characters all actively marveled that the locals could construct buildings and traps of such complexity and snickered at their music, garb, and customs... sure. I doubt that's the case, though.

For comparison, The Rugrats Movie opens with the four babies imagining themselves visiting a temple of doom and mystery in a humid, tropical jungle. Tommy is dressed up for a safari, Chuckie is dressed like Indiana Jones, Phil is in a colonial soldier outfit, and Lil is a flight jacket with vintage pilot goggles. They escape incredibly elaborate traps, a rolling boulder (because Indiana Jones), and almost claim the sacred statue of "banana split sundae." Is this racist? If you think so, and I'm betting that you do, remember that people 80 years from now will likely have as negative a set of opinions regarding the motifs and aesthetics of your novels and art as you do of those from 80 years prior. Subjective, not objective.

Tastes and concepts of socially acceptable imagery are not constant. They're subjective, and they vary across time and across peoples. As a friendly suggestion, I'd give Rebellion (and artists in general) a benefit of a doubt and not assume ill intent unless you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

But eh. This isn't an era of due process.

Edit addition: oh, and I like that your posts started with "probably." I respect that. It's good that you don't dabble in absolutes until pressured by the forums. Not everything is yin or yang.

@lazyimperial: Uh yes, everything you described there is racist and imperialist. The entire genre of pulp adventure and treasure-hunting is, because it peddles a fantasy that there are still untouched cultural silos for wealthy westerners to discover. It's fundamentally rooted in colonialism. This isn't about "enlightenment", it's about what happened. Billions of today's dollars in cultural wealth and history were taken by Western invaders, and even when it was done in the name of preservation those artifacts ended up in places like the Ashmolean and the British museum. It was a strip-mining of those culture's history and wealth that was rationalised and lionised in the late colonial era through pulp adventure novels, and now companies like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics, and now Rebellion are still relying on those same tired, racist touchstones to theme their games around.

@lazyimperial: this is a very uncritical post.

This is the first i've seen of this game, and i'm surprised it's not a metroidvania game to be honest.

To those who try to use "but it was OK back then.." as an excuse, that stuff definitely ends up in a slippery slope.. Back in the day, to a lot of people, the KKK were the good guys. Let's not give devs free reign to dig into history and make a game that would be OK in the 1930s or whenever? Or 1830? A slave breeding simulator that would be perfectly fine in 1830 wouldn't be OK by todays standards.. It would have been unethical back then, but we were too dumb to really grasp what we were doing, much like how the dumbs of today just can't conceive of humanity being capable of changing the climate or making any impact on the planet what so ever. It's OK today in conservative circles to just burn coal all day, happily ignorant of the effects. These people will be seen as complete r-words in 100 years time, and a coal-pollution-simulator isn't going to sit well with the people who had to flee the coastline and are now living in shanty towns across the dust bowl.

Things that were OK back in the day were racist even if people of the time didn't acknowledge racism. Plundering civilizations was OK back then eventhough ethically it was just as fucked up as it is today, we were just ignorant mouth breathers back then. As we move on, we learn, and we look back on history going "ohshit, that can't happen again!" Cause we used to be really bad. Really really really bad people who didn't much care about what happened to brown people.. Today, we care slightly more and feel ashamed of our great grandparents. (and our grandparents around thanksgiving.. Maybe even the odd uncle or father.. or younger sibling etc.)

To some people, ISIS are the good guys. If a dev just made a game that made being an ISIS member a cool action war thingie, people would obviously freak out.. Cause ISIS are definitely the bad guys. White grave robbers of yesteryear? Good guys? Probably not..

One man's hero is another man's monster. Devs need to know what they're making.. Few people know history.

After having spent the first six years of my college-life earning a Master's in English Literature, which proved a comically unwise choice for The Great Recession's job market, I burned out on being critical about stuff like this. On an off-topic aside, that burn out (and job market experience) is why I switched gears, went into accounting, and am halfway through an M.B.A..

Now don't get me wrong, I'm still an English Major at heart. I nit-pick on both little details and core gameplay features. I "rose and thorn" critique films, tv shows, games, and music so much that some of my work colleagues openly wonder how my wife puts up with me. I wonder too. :-P

That having been said, six years of liberal arts made me very aware that EVERY aesthetic and motif is loaded with baggage and offensive to someone. Fallout 3's 1950s aesthetic offended some of my peers, who claimed that utilizing such said aesthetic was ethically irresponsible and implicitly promoted a sugar-coated, mainstream American "Leave it to Beaver" recollection of Post-WWII American history that ignored the plights of ethnic minorities and marginalized, assimilated sub-cultures.

Including Feudal Chinese imagery and motifs in Western Art is cultural appropriation to some consumers. Including Viking aesthetics and motifs is making light of the plights of the myriad Slavic and Latin peoples who these Germanic invaders ruthlessly subjugated and tormented for centuries. Using Hinduism as a basis for video games or TV Shows is appropriating a modern religion's and continuing a tradition of Western exploitation and abuse of the sub-continent. Games and movies that utilize fluffy mainstream 1980s pop culture imagery (Ready Player One springs to mind as a modern example) are contributing to a process of marginalizing non-mainstream cultural imagery and ignoring the terrible post-colonial, imperialist policies of the Reagan-era United States.

On and on. These are predominantly contemporary American examples, too. I'm not even skipping across either pond and/or dabbling in older motifs. It's all... a bit much. A lot much. Too much.

I found it exhausting, and still do, especially because it literally leaves me with nothing to work with as either a consumer or occasional short-story scribbler. Buy that new Tolkein-based game from Warner Bros? Do you know how imperialist and offensive Lord of the Rings is? Did you buy Watch Dogs? Do you know how culturally insensitive and exploitative of urban stereotypes that game is? Did you buy Witcher 3? Do you realize how much that game marginalizes real Polish-region minorities and makes light of their plights within society? Did you buy Assassin's Creed: Syndicate? I hope you know that Victorian imagery and motifs were built on the backs of a quarter of the world's population living under the yoke of British tyranny! Think of that as you rope line across your palaces of marble and gold filigree. Did you like Assassin's Creed: Black Flag? Did you know that Caribbean pirate-themes make light of the terrible racism, barbarism, and cruelty inherent in the European territory grabs of the era? Do you know what the Spaniards did to the natives of what became Hispaniola?! Writing something yourself? Get ready for the anger should anyone find it floating on the web. Better be about grey blobs in a land of neutral tones that draws upon no pre-existing human cultures or history (save if you cite such said cultures and histories in order to stand on a soap box and rage against the machine).

On the note of subjectivity, the response to Witcher 3 from some community peers really floored me, because I grew up in a town with an active Polish-American Club and learned a lot about the marginalization of Eastern Europeans of Slavic descent. As a Yankee with a grandmother who viewed Irish people as a group of Celtic others (I'm half-Irish, and it took her a while to come to terms with that) and didn't quite consider Slavic people the same as West Europeans, the whole cast of Witcher 3 was minority representation to me. To others, apparently not so much.

Have I shifted from un-critical to critical yet?

I find it much less exhausting to just give people a benefit of a doubt. You aren't a racist for making a Pirates of the Caribbean game and using early 18th century imperial-era Caribbean aesthetics. Racism is actively viewing your culture and people as superior to others, and giving me a brig with twenty crew members singing "Leave her Johnny, Leave Her" as we sail into the port of Tortuga isn't anything like that. Now if such said game started actively disparaging natives and espousing what its creators perceived as the innate superiority of Europeans, both via the characters and the game's own handling of plot and setting... then my benefit of a doubt goes away. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

I see nothing to indicate Strange Brigade is prejudiced. In my opinion, calling it racist is an unsubstantiated accusation.

Edit addition: at the risk of reading too much into some of the stances I've seen, I imagine that often the problem is actually not the art-work's choice of aesthetics so much as perceived whimsy related to its usage of such said aesthetics. If Strange Brigade had the same motifs, but stood upon a podium and spent every level denouncing European empires and railing against injustices in our socioeconomic systems, I imagine it wouldn't be getting this kind of critique. It also wouldn't be lighthearted, fluffy, pulp-fiction fun anymore; it'd be a self-righteous sermon. Frankly, I get enough of those every day as is.

You gotta use the traps people.

@lazyimperial: "Have I shifted from un-critical to critical yet?"

totally. I can't speak for the one other person mentioning the colonialist context of this aesthetic, but that was all I was advocating to recognize. THAT is racist, no arguing. I don't exactly think that the subjectivities of the past really matter when determining if something is racist in a present context, but that's worth considering no doubt. I don't believe Rebellion are racists, or that anyone made this game with ill intent. That might be the other person's angle, but it's not mine. I love Indiana Jones, and tomb pillaging of any kind when it appears in contemporary media. It might be my favorite.

Did they talk about this looking like uncharted on the podcast? Because this looks a lot like uncharted, which makes it a lot more interesting to me.

I'm just going to assume Ben couldn't read that option because he's a millennial and it was in cursive.

What a silly, fun looking game this is.

This seems alright. Especially using your supers & grenades to blow up a bunch of enemies at once seems satisfying.

@ybbaaabby Was that a Recess reference?