Brigador adds new pilots & units to raise hell all day long
Another Touro of duty
Gleeful synthwave mech-warcrime shooter Brigador got just that little bit better today, and it was already good enough to keep me coming back for the occasional spin well over a year from its launch. In what developers Stellar Jockeys are calling the 'Nĭ Hăo a Tutti' update (on account of adding Chinese & Italian localisations), the lighting engine has been overhauled, and a bunch of new pilots & vehicles have been added to Freelance mode, along with the option to play completed campaign missions with any loadout you like.
Brigador is a game that has received a whole lot of love. Alec thought very highly of it even in its original launch incarnation, and since then the developers have expanded the campaign, reworked the tutorial, tuned up a vast number of gameplay elements and generally polished it up to a mirror sheen.
This update isn't the biggest Brigador has seen, but it does bring a lot more life to its post-campaign Freelance mode, where you undertake freeform missions, with your payout/score determined by your chosen pilot and how underpowered your vehicle is for the job. New in this update are a slew of pilots that will only fight against certain factions, if you want to tune your enemy types to your liking.
While normally I tend not to buy game soundtracks, Brigador's sweetens the deal by also including a seven-hour-long audiobook that fleshes out the dystopian sci-fi setting of the game. Plus, I notice that the novel's antagonist Hugh Armbruster (modelled after developer Hugh Monahan) got tuned up this update, pitting him exclusively against Loyalist forces in Freelance mode.
For maximum authenticity, his mech in the book was a Buckmaster, armed with a Zeus railgun, Bonesaw machinegun, and had Active Camo; there's even an achievement for playing him this way. There's a good few achievements that reward playing around with different loadouts and characters like this. You can see who and what else joined the roster in the full patch-notes here.
Brigador is available via Itch, Steam, Humble and GOG, and while this update will see the game discounted across all storefronts, at the time of writing the game is especially cheap on GOG right now thanks to the big summer sale going on. If you've not grabbed it yet, now would be the time, and take a look at the rest of RPS's GOG sale recommendations while you're at it.