Brigador

For Ross and anyone else looking for more story from this game, the soundtrack comes with an accompanying audiobook that really fleshes out the world. It follows the perspective of a private, a Brigador, and a Captain-Commander as the operation to "liberate" Solo Nobre begins and really drives home that these are people, each with their own thoughts and agendas. I don't see the enemy vehicles in this game as just sprites/units, but as rebels putting it all on the line, stubborn soldiers manning their posts to the end, and ruthless invaders from space. I can't recommend Brigador enough. Great Leader loves you, and He always will.

The music is excellent, the graphics are excellent and the story is pretty great. You'll need to do some reading, and pay attention to the environments, but it's there and pretty well fleshed out. Probably the best "You're the bad guy, actually" story I've played in a videogame.

As far as gameplay goes, it is *not* a run-n-gun freewheeling twin-stick shooter. Maneuver, positioning, and the noise your weapons make all matter a great deal, as well as tunneling through the level and controlling how much you're engaged with enemies.

The game itself is divided between the campaign, where missions are somewhat puzzle-like with fixed objectives, a selection of 4 vehicles and their attendant loadout; and the Freelance mode, where you choose your pilot (who determines difficulty), vehicle, weapons, and special ability, followed by choosing what maps you want to run.

There is a huge variety of vehicles that manage to minimize how same-y they feel even among examples in the same class. Generally larger, more powerful vehicles are less expensive and make less money on a run, while smaller vehicles are more expensive to unlock and have much greater cash-earning capability. Their guns run the inverse in cost, as smaller/lighter vehicles are far more dependent on an effective combination of weapons, while the really big stuff can have a single mount pull all the weight and combos are generally (generally! Not always!) not as important.

That said, the aiming takes a lot of getting used to, as ever projectile has moderate-to-heavy drop, fairly long flight times, and the targeting lines end about 4/5ths of the way to the point of aim.

I 100% agree to what TheGrimCorsair said.

The game remindet me most of a mixture of Crusader no remorse and the old desert strike helicopter games.

You have to carefully dismantle the enemy forces, choose your engagements and time your retreats. It's a tactical action game.

I completely agree with Ross on this one: I had fun playing the campaign, but grinding missions for the unlocks wasn't fun for me