Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread

I went in expecting a breezy Saturday-morning-cartoon romp and came out having died on the same spiked corridor more times than I'd like to admit. That gap between expectation and reality is actually part of Blast Brigade's quiet appeal. The cartoon aesthetic is loud and colorful, the dialogue is cheerfully irreverent, and then the game slides a platforming gauntlet under your feet and grins. It is, at its core, a metroidvania shooter that borrows the feel of classic run-and-gun action and wraps it around interconnected map design that rewards patient backtracking. The four-character roster is the mechanical centrepiece. You start as Jeff Jefferson, an all-American wiseguy whose grenade launcher doubles as a door-breaker and whose personality sits somewhere between a parody and a self-aware action hero. Shura, a cold-war sniper, brings a grappling hook that opens vertical traversal routes. Galahad, a cyborg Scotsman, powers movable platforms. Vortex, a chakram specialist you unlock late in Act 4, warps around the arena and, once paired with PDA modules like Iron Gut and Life Siphon, becomes a devastating screen-clearer. Swapping between them on the fly is seamless, and the character-specific gates scattered across the island give that classic "I need to come back here later" itch a very satisfying scratch. The PDA module system is where the build variety lives. Modules are passive perks - damage boosts, coin magnets, extended invincibility frames - but each battery you find can only power one at a time, so you cannot stack them into an invincibility run. It keeps the game honest throughout. Combat itself is snappy at 60fps, the twin-stick aiming feels responsive, and the roster of secondary weapons (shotgun for close quarters, sniper for patience, grenade launcher for structural redecorating) gives real tactical weight to loadout decisions at hammock save points. Those boss fights are genuinely satisfying - big health bars mean you have to memorise patterns rather than just spray, and the eventual "click" when a boss finally falls feels earned. The world spans jungle villages, cliffside prisons, volcanic interiors, and ancient temples, and the biome variety keeps the 20-hour runtime from overstaying its welcome. Where the game earns honest criticism: checkpoint placement can be stingy in a way that sends you through cleared rooms repeatedly after a death, and occasional foreground-background readability issues in the art can cause cheap platforming failures - notably in some of the harder late sections. The game also offers no accessibility settings worth mentioning, so players who want a difficulty slider will have nowhere to turn. And to be direct with genre-fatigued readers: Blast Brigade does not reinvent anything. Dash, wall-climb, grapple, backtrack - it is all familiar furniture arranged in a reliably competent room. But the voice acting is genuinely fun, the writing has more warmth than the premise suggests, and the relationships between the characters build into something worth finishing. For players who love the genre and do not mind a hard edge, this is one of the more complete packages the indie metroidvania space has produced. Steam user reviews sit at 87% positive, which tracks with the experience: not a revelation, but a sincere, well-crafted one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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