Strange Brigade - Review

Rebellion takes us to an adventure film straight out of the 30s, complete with lost treasures, curses, ancient gods and mad explorers. Are you ready to enter the Strange Brigade? We took a tour of their ranks, find out how it went in our review!

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On paper the idea of ​​Strange Brigade is crazy: imagine being able to take movies or series like Indiana Jones, Relic Hunter, The Legend of Extraordinary Men, i Goonies but also King Kong o The Mummy, squeeze them and insert them inside one multiplayer shooter full of puzzles, treasures, secrets and weapons to find. All accompanied by a voice that seems to come out of the American propaganda spots of the war period. In this way you will immediately understand what Strange Brigade is, a title that, unfortunately, must also deal with a technical realization that is not exactly exciting, but let's go in order.

Like new Indiana Jones

I protagonists of this journey into adventure 4 sleep, all already available at the start of the game, each with a specific skill. We have the occult arts expert, Professor Archimedes de Quincey; Nalangu Rushida, African demon hunter; Frank Fairburne, mercenary and spy e Gracie Braithwaite, great Lancashire fighter. The members of the brigade will be called to fight a dangerous Egyptian entity capable of awakening the dead. In reality though the story is never really highlighted and it seems only a pretext to eliminate hordes of enemies.

Each hero corresponds to a short story about his past available in the booklet from which it is also possible to equip weapons and skills. On this front we will have available a paraphernalia that looks like it just came out of the world wars complete with sticky grenades and sticks of dynamite. The skills instead range from the more classic, such as statistics and enhanced shots, to more characteristic skills such as the possibility of use the souls of deceased enemies to create fireballs with which to burn the opponents still alive.

Once our hero has been chosen, the adventure will begin and a short black and white film will introduce the chosen expedition. Just a pity that has not been fully translated and we will have the possibility to read only something in our language while the rest remains in English. A strange choice that leaves the player a bit ' sense of incompleteness. Moreover the writings on the screen are really too small and they seem meant only for those closest to the monitor, such as PC gamers.

A mountain of adventures, perhaps too similar ...

The graphics of the title are extremely accurate and detailed, especially as regards the scenarios. Even if very accurate, however, the settings seem just like those old adventure series in which, after seeing a series of episodes, things start to look all the same. It will often happen, in fact, to see polygonal models of some objects reused for several levels: like the Egyptian jugs in the pirate ships and the sarcophagi of the pharaohs placed in the deep jungle. A strange choice that gives the idea of ​​one hasty realization and not fully cured. Instead, it continues to remain a weak point for Rebellion (just like in their other production Sniper Elite) the realization of the characters who always remain a bit woody in their movements e quite lacking in textures compared to everything else.

Where the adventure ends and unfortunately also the fun

If until now we could overlook a plot and graphics that are not exactly exciting, we cannot however reward a gameplay that is repetitive and with a build that seems too much left to chance and not optimized for consoles. While the expeditions maintain a high level of stylistic variety: Egyptian tombs, cursed ships, deep jungles and all the imaginative panorama generated by the adventure genre; on the other hand we find a series of objectives that too repetitive after a few hours of play. It basically involves killing all enemies in an area, pressing switches and repeating. This is done at least two or three times per shipment. In some moments we will be relieved of our repetitive task from little puzzles which, however, always concern the pressing switches, this time in the right order or respecting certain deadlines. Finally there will also be the possibility of collect some items distributed throughout the expedition and which will serve to open a door full of treasures usually located at the end of the level.

The biggest problem with the title, however, is in the shooting system because, due to one bad shot calibration, most shots will miss even the closest enemies. In addition, in some stages, you will be required to hit some in a short time too small switches and you will end up losing the game more for the inaccuracies of the technical sector than for a real lack of skill of the player. A system that is much more functional on the PC, with the precision of the mouse. Furthermore, the majority of hits that go to sign have a delay of at least one second from when the bullet actually hits the enemy to when the latter falls to the ground destroyed. Another problem that becomes in the long run quite annoying, especially in the most hectic phases.

Despite the graphic variety of enemies, these nevertheless continue to have the same pattern of movements of those encountered in the first expeditions, with a Really low-level AI, so much so that they will often go to position themselves on the traps scattered around the maps such as rotating blades, pits of spikes etc. Too bad, we were expecting a Left 4 Dead adventurous and instead we found ourselves in front of a great idea crippled by poor technical realization.

Final Comment

Riding the climate of nostalgia that now permeates everything, Rebellion proposes a old-fashioned fps with multiplayer-focused gameplay and settings that seem to have just come out of a adventure film from the 30s. It's just a pity that the videogame transposition from cinema to videogame was not perfectly successful: on the one hand, the Indiana Jones-like atmospheres work perfectly; on the other hand, it is precisely the playful part that does not offer an exciting experience. THE technical problems they are obvious and often tend to lead to frustration even gamers who are willing to turn a blind eye to not-so-brilliant gameplay. This strange brigade, however, amuses and is a good pastime for evenings with friends, between a beer and a slice of pizza. Recommended for those who want to return to the arcade, maybe as soon as the token price drops.