Play relevant month: Broforce

You can talk about the toxicity of hyper-masculinity if you want, but there's something truly epic about the 80s era of action hero. Banal, ridiculous and adorned with giant muscles alongside giant guns and often giant chins, this was the point where PC didn't quite come into the picture but film making had decided exactly how they wanted to do it. For better or worse.

Broforce is both a tribute and a homage to this lost, actually kind of tedious to watch era of film making. I don't know what Broforce originally intended to go about making, but as we'll explore, Broforce is about bros very much re-creating that action film charm. As an aside, bro in this case is both the name of all the characters - with such classics as Bronan, Brobocop and Ellen Ripbro - and a description of their bro-dentity. Bros are generally slanted toward male, but there are female bros, just as there are female action heroes.

I'm a bit disappointed there's no Brofee, but I guess she isn't distinctive enough? Ah c'mom, Pam Grier was awesome in that movie. Whatever!

Broforce succeeds because it doesn't worry about... To be frank, much of anything. It's a side-scrolling run and gun shooter, or a jumpnshootman as I like to refer to other games of this nature. But the elements that make Broforce different lies in the name. The bro. The bros. And the attitude of mayhem that may, in a way, fit the bro moniker just as well.

Bro-hem.

Broforce is a pixel based jumpnshootman. You've seen these games before, you've certainly played them if you're any experience level of PC gamer outside the ultra casual - though yes, I know the line is blurred - and Broforce doesn't exactly break out from the mold. You have a wide variety of moves, more than the usual, but you still mostly end up running around in a pixel-world running and gunning down mooks.

Visually Broforce is above average for pixel art games. It's not quite Metal Slug, which it is clearly homaging in parts, but it does have a certain visual finesse to it that is satisfying to the eye. The game manages to be very stylized even with the limited framework of pixel art, using audio to fill in where the visuals are too simple.

In terms of audio, the game is a real treat. The music is standard fare, it's good, but nothing you're going to play as an mp3 later. The audio though, the screams, doinks and just general mayhem is conveyed perfectly. The reason for this leads to one of the two areas the game absolutely excels at, much more than any pixel game, and this is the beating heart that pumps all the fun through Bro Force: environmental destruction.

If you've ever watched any action film ever, you're familiar with environmental destruction. It is the bread and butter, the origin of the term "set piece" and Michael Bay's billion dollar hit movies. The world collapses under the weight of these films, and Broforce replicates this feeling wonderfully. Heavy machines break floors, burning bridges collapse, propane tanks and fuel lines all explode in great bursts that take with them huge chunks of the terrain. The hapless mooks go with them, gravity honestly killing far more of them than your bullets ever will. Some mooks are suicide bombers, and with them, the carnage that unfolds can consume whole sections of the map as great chain reactions go off.

And the audio, ah bro, bro the distant screams and shouts of alarm as explosions chain through just sounds perfect. It's gross and vulgar, but that's 80s action hero for you, and between the two the game just replicates it perfectly. The best moments of course are when you set off the explosion with you in the middle and burst through the carnage as a true action hero. A true action bro. Bro.

The other thing the games does well, albeit with some caveats, is the variety of bros. The game gives you one hit, you die, and then you swap to a different bro. There are something like forty different bros in the game, which unlock over the course of the campaign. I think in finishing the campaign you'll probably have most or all of them unlocked.

Now, don't get me wrong, they're not all that well balanced and the game could use a little explanation when it comes to some of their skills, but they play radically differently. Each of them has a different primary gun, and then a special, including some specials that only trigger under different but commons circumstances or work in very different ways. The most basic ones are just grenades or calling in an airstrike, but some of the later ones are really wild.

So you're constantly playing levels with constantly changing terrain as it explodes and constantly changing characters as you explode. The game is simply fantastic for keeping itself fresh and ridiculous.

The campaign in general is probably a good five or six hours long. I intentionally play Broforce in a silly, ridiculous way. The destructible terrain means if you play very intelligently and cautiously, the game is really easy, but where's the fun in that? No, instead it's better to hurl yourself into the action and just let it happen.

Where Bro Force loses the narrative is basically any time the game is intentionally hard. In normal gameplay, you die. You die a lot. Debris falls on you, random enemies explode, you take a bullet while jumping, it happens. None of this bothers you or even means anything since you just swap to another bro and if you fail the mission just go again. It's high energy silliness. The game is at its peak when you're trying to do something insane and succeeding, but four out of five times, you die.

But on the other hand, it's the randomness you start to mind in the bad spots. But specifically, intentionally difficult spots where you die over and over start to push hard on the game's randomness in the other direction. Instead of thinking 'ha! Brobocop totally sucked for that!' you start thinking 'stop giving me the idiot with a turkey I want to get this done'. The characters all have very different skill sets, and some some spots, a great special isn't as helpful as a good weapon. Or vice versa. The huge variety of characters and the total randomness can become a bit of a drag.

On the other hand, the game's skill ceiling is much higher than you'd think. Sometimes a character you least expect to be useful in a given situation is in fact excellent, and sometimes the opposite is true as well. It's an interesting game when it comes to surprising you. You have a lot of options in how to fight - you can push barrels, drop propane tanks or knock out floors - which means stopping to consider things can make the game much easier

While the game has a somewhat limited number of enemies relative to how many you kill - generally you fight the same two guys, but there are some heavy-hitters you see a couple of on each level - there's actually quite a variety of bosses and encounters. And again, since each bro can play so differently, re-doing a fight often plays completely differently the second or third time.

I would definitely recommend Broforce. The normal difficulty was just right for me and playing it ridiculously. I played through about half the campaign on hard, but a lot of the later bosses were just tedious enough on normal I wasn't too keen on doing them on hard. The game naturally keeps itself fresh and ridiculous with the randomness; sometimes this is a bit annoying but you need to relax a little while playing. I don't have my steamlink yet, so I haven't tried it out multiplayer, but I definitely plan on it.

I killed Satan by taking steroids and flexing so hard a mechsuit above him ran in fear, breaking through the floor and crushing him as it fell. As the victory screen rolled, I was still flexing. Bro, for real, bro.