March(4/12): BroforceAvailable this month on PS Plus, Broforce is a 2D pixel art side scrolling platform shoot em up with an interesting hook. Think The Expendables but where every TV and action movie character you care about is in it and playable. You start off as Rambro (no, not a misspelling, every character will have Bro shoehorned into their name somehow) and move from left to right shooting up enemies to reach the goal. Along you way you will save other Bros, scattered through the stage. Each one, when rescued, acts as an extra life and also becomes your new player character. The more you rescue, the greater the pool of choices becomes as they are all randomly selected. Each character can only afford to get hit once, take a hit and you die where you respawn at the last checkpoint with a different character.
There are a large number of characters to play as and the draw for me throughout the game was to see which character you could unlock next. The game feels like an homage to 80's action flicks and each character has their own unique weapon or abilities to distinguish one from the other. Commando (Brommando) uses a rocket launcher, Robocop (Brobocop) has a gun which fires larger burst rounds the longer you hold the fire button down for, Machete (Brochete) throws machetes around and can shock enemies if he hits an enemy with a gruesome melee attack. Amongst the rampant testosterone, the game also includes female heroines to the team too, Ripley, Kill Bill's Bride and Cherry Darling from Planet Terror, all unique from each other and require a subtle difference to how you play the game.
The game itself is pretty straightforward with the exception of destructible environments. Bullets, bombs and explosions can affect the terrain and shape how you handle situations. Can't get up because a team of bad guys are looking your way? Shoot the ground from underneath them and watch them fall to their death. Chain reactions are frequent, as one explosion can lead to another and another and another and another, where it feels deliberately designed in order to display as much anarchic chaos as possible. There is co-op multiplayer as well, but I tackled the game single player only to completion with relative ease with the exception of some later levels and boss fights.
My biggest complaint with the game is that the random selection of bro's can often screw you over sometimes when you're randomly assigned a Bro and it's not the best fit for the situation. When a boss fight shows that throw grenades into it's mouth deals the most damage, it doesn't help when the game chooses a melee only character to work with who's a poor match against someone who you can't get close to due to a barrage of fireballs. It leads to a frustating death and depending on if that was your last life, having to go back to the checkpoint and work up to the boss fight again hoping for a better match up, where the chances get less frequent the more Bro's you unlock. Boss fights can also be hit and miss depending on which character you have, I particularly struggled with a boss for 20 mins only to get Ba Baracus and have his flamethrower defeat the boss effortlessly.
There are some noticeable technical issues too such as big framerate drops, especially on later levels where more explosions causes the game to crawl to the finish line rather than power slide through it. Don't know if this is true for any other version, but on the PS4, there is also a consistent bug where almost 2-3 seconds into the start of a level, the game will refuse to accept any input you make from the controller. Your character won't move and you can't attack for about a second. Mostly it's ok but where death can be frequent and restarting a level is common, then this adds up and can get frustrating. In particular with levels which require you to dodge enemies right off the bat.
Ultimately, it's a fun game, the draw of seeing more playable 80's action heroes realised in what looks like a gory Saturday morning cartoon is what kept me interested, but the game is challenging and fun to play. Also, the ending song is almost worth a point in itself, I'm singing along to it as I listen to it again here.
7/10