Review: Strange Brigade (Switch) – Belongs in a museum

Once again, Rebellion Developments has brought another one of their third-person shooters to the Nintendo Switch. Only this time, they announced it during a Nintendo Direct and released the game on the very same day! In my review of their last release on Switch Sniper Elite 4, I mentioned that I believe Rebellion to be one of the more underappreciated developers making games for the system. Each port and game is a significant improvement over the previous one. And so with every new game of their’s announced, I’m always curious to see what they’re capable of pulling off on Nintendo’s underpowered hybrid

Don’t have much of an introduction to this game as this is the first Rebellion game I’m covering to not be directly tied to the Sniper Elite franchise. Although with that being said, it utilizes the same engine and a lot of the same mechanics as both Sniper Elite and the sub-series Zombie Army. In fact, it seems to me that Strange Brigade was perhaps meant to be a spiritual successor of sorts to Zombie Army. Maybe to take the third-person co-op shooter action and do something new and straying away from the tired World War 2 setting of those games.

Like with my previous reviews, I’ll get all the technical nitty-gritty details out of the way first. After all, Strange Brigade has been out on other platforms for a few years now. So it makes sense that whether or not the port itself is good takes higher precedent. After last year’s port of Sniper Elite 4, I was convinced that the devs over at Rebellion were basically wizards as they delivered on a port that to my eyes seemed to have shared visual parity with the Xbox One release of a game. But as time flies by and they move on to grander and more technically demanding games, I wondered if SE4 would’ve been a sort of peak for the team. The answer is, kinda? I had actually played a bit of Strange Brigade on the Xbox One and to my eyes, I honestly think the Switch version overall looks a bit better, but it seems that’s more due to the Switch version having a dynamic resolution over the locked sub-native resolution of the Xbox One version. And as you’d expect, that resolution tends to drop once the screen is littered with enemies and explosions (and everything in this game explodes). But it usually recovers pretty quickly and I was pretty impressed overall with how the game looked. My only other note about the Switch version is that the lighting seemed to have taken a hit. It doesn’t ruin the look of the game but there are a few sequences where you get the feeling something is ‘off’ due to certain effects being toned down.

Next, I’ll very briefly touch on the framerate. Like the other Rebellion ports (and most Switch ports for that matter), the game runs at a 30fps cap. That being said, it’s not as strong of a lock as the other Rebellion ports have been. But it is to be expected given how hectic the game’s action is (once again, everything in this game explodes). But I wouldn’t say the drops are really all that bad at all and these drops are only limited to some of the game’s most intense arenas much later into the campaign mode. And even then, the framerate only seems to drop into maybe the mid-20s? It drops enough to be noticeable but not enough to be gameplay impeding in any way while being infrequent enough to not be too much of a serious issue but should still be stated regardless.

The last bit of technical guff I’ll touch on is the online play. Seeing how the game is heavily focused on its co-op play, I felt it made sense to play through the game’s campaign with a friend. The Switch’s online functionality gets a bad reputation but in my experience, it’s more of a fault of certain games than the system’s capabilities or the online service as a whole. My friend and I live an entire country apart from each other and for the most part, my friend played the game in handheld mode on Wi-Fi and… it was good! It seems the game adds a tiny bit of input latency when you’re playing online but other than that, the experience was solid. No lag spikes, no real lag issues at all, and no disconnects at any point. About halfway through the game’s campaign, we began to open up our lobby to allow random players to join us and that didn’t seem to change anything. A very smooth and pleasant experience.

Now, we can talk about the game itself. As I said earlier, the game is a co-op third-person shooter with generally similar gameplay to the Zombie Army games. The key difference being that whereas Zombie Army is horror-focused and set in World War 2, Strange Brigade is set in the 1930s and is focused on treasure hunting. You’re still running around and gunning down hordes of the “undead”, but instead of directly focusing on killing as much as possible there’s also a heavy reliance on puzzle-solving and exploration.

Jumping between mindless killing and puzzle-solving might sound jarring but I found it to actually be really engaging. The game overall has a very old-school feeling. Not just in reference to the 1930s setting and visual but it gave a really nice sense of adventure and arcade action that you would probably expect from an old arcade game. Especially once the game starts throwing you into these massive arenas swarmed with enemies and big (and I do mean BIG) bosses with attack patterns to memorize and certain weak points to hit. There truly is a lot of fun to be had with this game.

At the same time though, I do feel like something was lacking from the experience. One issue I had with the game was its levels. More specifically, the length of them. The game features nine levels and each one is about 40 minutes long. During the second half of the game where the puzzles get trickier and the action gets wackier (again, everything in this game explodes), this is totally fine. But the first 3 or 4 levels focus almost solely on fighting the standard common enemies so it can save much of the grandiose puzzles and special encounter enemies for later. And these opening levels are just as long as the later game ones. And while I wouldn’t really call Strange Brigade short, it is certainly underwhelming when the whole first third of your game feels a bit boring due to a lack of challenge and just dragging on. They should’ve reserved all the tutorial training bits for one mission and then just up the ante from there.

Another issue I had was just a general lack of character from the main cast. The sarcastic narrator was quite the funny touch (I like how there are quips for not touching the controller for a prolonged period of time and then moving again). But the actual main cast is just kinda bland, with most of their interactions coming down to randomly yelling quips whenever they feel like it.

Also, this game has a horde mode. That’s all I have to say about that. (and yes, everything explodes in that mode too)

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Strange Brigade but it’s not exactly a game I would quickly return to anytime soon. If you’re just coming to this review to see how the game runs, it’s another fantastic port for the Switch. As a game, I’d personally wait for a sale before bugging all your friends to pick up a copy but you’ll still have a fun time. Did I mention everything in this game explodes?

7/10

Big thanks to Rebellion Developments for supplying me with two review codes for the game!