Strange Brigade

I went into Strange Brigade half-expecting a budget Left 4 Dead reskin dressed in a pith helmet, and what I got was something more specific and more charming than that. Rebellion took the horde-clearing DNA from their Zombie Army Trilogy work and rebuilt it around four playable characters, a branching-path Egypt that rewards exploration, and a radio-drama narrator who is, without exaggeration, one of the best things in the game. The narration is tongue-in-cheek, fourth-wall-aware, and persistent in a way that keeps the tone light even when you are dying to the same armoured mummy champion for the third time in a row. The structure is consistent across all thirteen-ish campaign levels: push forward, shoot hordes of undead ranging from slow shambling mummies to armoured grenadiers, charging bull champions, and skeletons, hit a puzzle or two, find a boss arena. The puzzles are not brain-melting, most are combination doors or tile sequences that scale their complexity to player count, so a solo run stays manageable while a four-player session becomes collaborative in ways that feel genuinely designed rather than bolted on. Collectibles are everywhere: six cat statues per stage that unlock a bonus room, hidden canopic jars, diary entries that add lore, and relic parts that feed into the amulet upgrade system. The amulets are where character differentiation lives, each of the four base characters (Gracie Braithwaite the engineer, Nalangu Rushida the wayfinder, Frank Fairburne the soldier, and Archimedes de Quincy the scholar) carries their own unique active abilities unlocked by spending relic-earned skill points. Beyond that, everyone shares the same gun pool: shotguns, bolt-action rifles, submachine guns, pistols, and special mid-match purchases like flamethrowers and grenade launchers. You can slot gems into weapons to add effects such as ricochet rounds, health leeching, or fire damage, which gives the loadout enough texture to keep you fiddling without demanding spreadsheet homework. Here is the honest part: the gunplay is competent but never crisp. Collision detection can feel loose, projectiles occasionally register late, and some players will find the shooting floaty compared to a dedicated third-person shooter. The weapon balance also leans heavily toward sniper rifles once you get past the starter tier, and the campaign, completable in roughly eight to twelve hours, runs out of steam before the final boss fights, which a number of critics flagged as overlong and repetitive. Beyond the campaign, Horde mode and Score Attack fill the gap reasonably well. Horde pits you through waves on dedicated maps (each round of fifteen waves can push close to two hours), while Score Attack is a speed-run variant that chases leaderboard placement. Neither mode is revelatory, but both extend the life of the game if your friend group is still having fun. The single biggest variable is your lobby. Solo, Strange Brigade is playable and even enjoyable for a collectible-hunter who wants to comb every corner of each level. With two to four people, it opens up considerably, the puzzle scaling, the trap combos, the shared chaos of a mummy swarm hitting from three directions at once. It is one of those co-op games where laughing at something going wrong feels as good as winning. The content ceiling is real, but at a discounted price it is a very easy recommendation for anyone who wants something low-commitment and immediately accessible without menus full of stats to manage.

Alex · Scout Team

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