A REVIEW IAN CHANDLER

Strange Brigade by Rebellion is a third person action-adventure set in a steampunk style 1930s, which features 1-4 online co-op, a variety of weapons, traps and puzzles. It’s available on PC, Xbox 1 and PS4, usually for around £25.00.

The setting is Egypt, where an ancient evil force, Seteki the Witch Queen has been unwittingly let loose by an archeologist. It’s the job of the Strange Brigade, made up of Nagala Rushida (African tribeswoman), Frank Fairburne (sharpshooter) Professor De Quincy (Scholar) and a Manchester factory worker Gracie Braithwaite. Each have their own starter weapons, and have a different powered up attack which you get by killing a variety of nasties.

The game itself looks pretty enough, and plays very similarly to Rebellion’s own Sniper Elite series but without slow motion replays of internal injuries.

I played mainly as Nagala, as she seemed to have the best starter weapon, also after finding a power-up, I discovered that I could take a lot of enemies out with one shot.

These weapon power-ups are difficult to find and in four stages I only managed to get the one. This is due to the nature of the puzzles in the game which have locked doors hidden by symbols that have to be opened in a variety of ways. Some of these are very obvious, some seemed completely random and you only get 3 chances before the door gets locked for good.

The quantity of enemies, mainly mummies and giant scorpions, can make the game a bit of a slog and you have to clear all of them in a certain area before moving on. There are some traps like spinning blades and spikes dotted about that you can shoot to activate, and occasionally you’ll pick up other weapons like grenade launchers which can help, but often the sheer weight of numbers makes it hard going. Ammunition dumps are quite well dotted around and your character’s pistol has infinite ammo but is really only good for setting off traps as it’s very weak. It’s the constant mowing down of the same creatures, together with a pretty but repetitive set of backgrounds that makes this game best played in multiplayer, as in one-player the puzzles aren’t amazing and you’ve basically seen all of this done before.

-Ian