Recent reviews by atomicthumbs

this is my first time playing a fromsoft game and it may be the best game i've ever played. i bought it saturday morning and by the time sunday night rolled around i found i'd played it for 20 hours. this does not happen to me

You are Luis Leng, a single Brigador in a small Mongoose powersuit. You have a light machine gun mounted to one arm, a light-caliber cannon in the other, a stolen Spacer camo system, and an Opportunity. Nobody knows you're there. Your targets are waiting in a country chalet. Overwhelming firepower guards them. You have made entrance to the district undetected, and you have an overview of the situation, courtesy of your employers. You sneak through the forest, knock down a hedge with your legs, forge your own path. You are still undetected. An enormous tank idles in front of the villa; its hardshields are lowered. They weren't expecting you. You aim between the trees, put an 84mm Carlos round in it, and it comes out the other side. The tank stops idling. Two scout vehicles approach from the other direction, attracted by the noise. You pepper them with 8mm Bonesaw rounds and they stop investigating. Your Carlos's autoloader slams a new shell into the breech and locks. You put your second cannon round of the day through the palatial house, blasting it to smithereens. Heavy tanks approach from the east. You flip the switch on your optic camo system; it buzzes to life, and you disappear into the underbrush. Three more targets to go.

You are Arturo Nemi, to make it simple; your body came with that name. You are a Brigador piloting an Arlo. Your Auxilliary hardpoint is fitted with a Broiler multi-discharge laser. Your Small hardpoint is fitted with a Black Hand. Something resembling a megaphone on steroids is fitted to the side mount. You like it that way. It's flexible. Your contract is freeform: it requires you to do as much damage as possible to forward the SNC's interests, which happen to align with your own. You cruise *through* the slums of Solo Nobre, using your agrav's hull to smash a tunnel towards your objective. A running tally of casualties and your payout for same updates in the corner of your vision. You're going for the big money, though. An orbital gun towers in front of you; mechs and agravs surround it. You close in behind a wall, and activate your audiokinetic pulse; you hear a tremendous echoing roar, bouncing off everything around you, and the orbital gun and everything around it start to crumble, followed immediately by an echoing explosion. You hear loud footsteps, approaching rapidly from around a corner, and aim your Black Hand at the wall; you see nothing, but a crackling hiss emits from it as you command it to fire. You watch with detached interest as the civilians running from your machine slump over, twitching and screaming, and the mechanical footsteps become erratic and stop. You pull around the corner and blast the stragglers' hulls to pieces with your Broiler. Three more guns to go.

You are Johnny Five Aces, legend of the timestream, renowned pilot of every sort of vehicle, legendary shot with a revolver, and renowned dapper gentleman. You are driving a Treehouse, a terrifying agglomeration of cars and tanks, thirty feet tall. You have a Ploughman 132mm chemical munitions launcher, aimed by a pair of steering wheels on your left, and a König 30mm rotary autocannon (known by another name, long ago), aimed by another pair on your right; you also have a smoke grenade launcher, but hiding is for dishonorable cowards. You grind your way into a necropolis, turning tombstones to powder underneath your treads. A scout spots you, and radios for backup. Dozens of huge walkers and heavy tanks come into view, bringing their guns to bear. You hold down the trigger of your König and furiously crank the traverse across them, filling them with depleted uranium. You hear a series of deafening cracks, and another, closer one from your hardshields as your generator shorts out; pivoting your vehicle, you see Mantis mechs, Loyalists with Galinha railguns, already far too close, followed by Touros and a few Mongoose pilots in suits. You aim the Ploughman at the Mantises, fire, and advance into the ominous white cloud toward the mechs behind them. A horrible creak emits from below you, as your Treehouse starts to melt; you've made a terrible mistake. The windshield of the station wagon-turned-cockpit pits and flows away, dissolved by the Tubarão; you are next, as the vapor drifts into your cockpit. Like a ball pushed off the edge of a cliff, you scream as the Treehouse is transformed back into the raw materials it was built from (scrap metal). You will never see Nina again, nor engage in cosmos-shattering intercourse with her, because you have died.

Welcome, Brigador.

Brigador's controls take a little while to get used to, especially if you haven't played an isometric game in a long time. I recommend binding a mouse button to "align to mouse"; it'll become second-nature quickly. The gameplay is both tactically and strategically deep, and extremely fun. The lore is both fascinating and well-written; the pilots have bios, the weapons and vehicles have intel summaries written like a technical manual, and there's plenty of other information to unlock as you earn the money to do so. I hear there's a novel and I'm looking forward to checking it out.

In short, I recommend it.

There is nothing bad about this video game. It is all good. It is Earthbound 2015, but also not. Buy.

This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ incredible. I can't get tired of finding out how terrible I am at driving a fast car quickly, instead of driving a slow car slowly as I do in real life.