Strange Brigade

Note: My Review is for the PC Steam edition. The Strange Brigade page does not have the PC release listed, even after I added it personally

Strange Brigade isn't necessarily bad, as in poorly made. But many factors of the game hold it back from being great and worth spending your money on.

Strange Brigade is a fairly standard 3rd Person horde mode shooter set in the 1930s. pitting one to four players in various temples, tombs, caves and the like in a goal to shoot undead things and collect treasures.

Gameplay is very straight foward, as your tools are a main gun with limited ammo, a side arm with unlimited ammo, an explosive, and an amulet that unleashes a special power after being filled with the souls or your killed enemies. Maps are fairly linear, with some points that may loop around or have alternate paths for puzzles that may contain gold, temporary power weapons, relics, and lore pick ups. I can't quite tell what relics are for, but the game does rate you on how many relics you acquired at the end of a level, along with secret shootable vases and cat statuettes that can be missed if you're aren't carefully searching for them.

The gunplay doesn't feel too great to me. It is similar to the Sniper Elite/Nazi Zombie Army games, so if you like those, you may enjoy this, but many of the automatic weapons feel too inaccurate or weak with out burst firing or single shotting, making weapons with smaller magazines but stronger bullets more effective in my opinion. I was concerned about the single bullet sniper rifle before I realized the reload is extremely fast and it is practically a repeater rifle. Special weapons with limited ammo like a Blunderbuss or Flamethrower can be picked up from chests that cost gold that you earn from killing enemies, opening containers or on the ground. Your pistol as a small magazine, but an unlimited pool of reserve ammo, which makes it great for shooting traps, destructable/explosive objects, and puzzles, which all seem to require shooting things. Melee seems pretty effective against most enemies, allowing you to knock them back before you can melee them again for an execution. Your explosive is pretty effective, and has a cooldown before reuse, though I hate how high the character lobs it and I had a few times where grenades go way off from my intended target. Amulets vary from chain lightnings, turning an enemy to an explosive missile, or my favorite, summoning a soul that is a very effective temporary turret.

There's a decent set of mechanics here in ammo management, headshot perks (depending on your character choice), amulets and trap usage, but the game does have a bit of emptiness to it.

There are pockets of hordes, monster closets, trap segments, puzzle segments, and secret segments, but it mostly feels like a constant jump between mediocre shooting and simple exploration and puzzle solving. None of it is done poorly, but it feels like a game meant to be played specifically with friends, so it gets pretty boring. But trying to play with other players is the problem - the playerbase is practically dead. There were no players online when I most recently played, and the previous time, there was only one player and I wasn't comfortable joining a game yet when I didn't know the mechanics yet. A game of this price level with no player base and a simplistic and repetitive gameplay loop is a hard sale. The overall game is fine, if not kind of good, but not fun or interesting enough for me to want to keep playing by myself to the end.

The good points of this game is the graphical fidelity art style of the game, which makes it a decent benchmarking tool - in fact, it comes with a 1 minute-ish benchmark mode that works with all the video settings. The audio is reasonabily crisp and loud and has some good narration from a typical "Tally-ho, perils and plunder" kind of male narrator you'd hear from movies and TV shows from the early 1900's era.

It's hard for me to recommend Strange Brigade at its full price due to its simple and reptitive nature as well as the lack of a player base for a game designed around co-op horde shooting. You can get more out of this if you have a group of friends to play with, but if you're expecting to go at it alone or join pubbies, Strange Brigade may carry itself through its own campaign.