Strange Brigade – mummies are the word

GameCentral gets several hours on Rebellion’s new four-player co-op shooter and finds a promising alternative to Left 4 Dead.

It’s not just the weather that has been unusually severe this year. With only a few exceptions this has been one of the longest and most sustained summer game droughts in recent memory. Where previous years seemed to suggest publishers were getting more adventurous with their release dates, 2018 has been a lot more risk adverse. Which means that we won’t start seeing the release schedules come back to life until the end of August… just when Strange Brigade comes out.



As a brand-new franchise Strange Brigade is wise not to launch in the middle of the Christmas game rush, but British publisher/developer Rebellion has a built-in fanbase that supports everything they do and the game has been gradually pilling on the hype since it was first announced. We’ve played it two or three times now, but last week was the first time we got to spend any considerable time on it, with the chance to play a full level in both single-player and multiplayer.

If you’ve not heard of it before, Strange Brigade is a four-player co-op game that’s somewhat reminiscent of Left 4 Dead but with a lighter tone and more puzzles. It has similarities with Rebellion’s own Nazi Zombie Trilogy, but the setting in Strange Brigade is a sort of idealised 1930s boy’s own adventure, with a group of Colonial era adventures taking on Egyptian-themed supernatural forces.


‘If you look at the games Rebellion produces they tend to have that kind of energetic, pulpy tone’ studio design lead Ben Fisher told us. ‘So Sniper Elite is a very sort of boy’s own adventure and Nazi Zombie Trilogy is like an 80s direct-to-VHS horror movie. So that kind of charismatic, accessible tone is something that’s quite uniquely Rebellion.

‘What we’ve done in the game, and in the writing, is we’ve avoided representing colonialism as a positive. So what we’ve aimed for is building the tone around that 1930s movie atmosphere. When the game really came to life was when the British Pathé voiceover was added to the game. And at that point all the tone started to stick together and the humour emerged, and it became much more obvious what direction it should take.’

The game’s not laugh out loud funny – there’s no Blackadder style political satire – but there is a wry sense of humour to everything, which makes it clear that none of what happens is supposed to be taken seriously. All we really caught of the story was that the big bad is a ghostly Egyptian queen, who seems to have resurrected every monster and ghost going – from skeletal pirates to giant scorpions.

Strange Brigade – there’s also a wave-based horde mode

We played through a level on our own first and were, to be honest, prepared for the worst – considering the game’s key appeal is the co-op. But it was actually perfectly entertaining, as the game world is filled with hidden secrets and there are usually dozens of enemies around at any time. As such, crowd control becomes more vital than shooting accuracy, and since ammo is relatively limited you have to make good use of various Indiana Jones style traps that can catch enemies in giant blenders or knock them off cliffs with spike blocks.



Each of the four characters has their own signature weapons and grenades but not only can these be upgraded with collected gems but you can actually pay to unlock each other’s weapons, so despite the era there’s plenty of variety when it comes to your armoury. If you save up enough money you can also unlock special limited-use weapons like a blunderbuss and flamethrower, which come in especially handy for bosses.

The gunplay is solid and entertaining, and the only disappointment at this point is the unique special moves which take an age to charge up but never seem to do very much. The ex-British soldier we were playing as has a charging attack that can send enemies flying, and explode them when they land, but it never seemed to justify the long charging time.

Strange Brigade – the pirate level manges to reference both The Goonies and Princess Bride

There is more to the game than just shooting though, as your path is often blocked by puzzles, which although simple when taken in insolation (think of something on about the level of a Lego game) are more involved than you would expect from a straight shooter.

‘That was one of the biggest challenges of development, finding that sweet spot’, said Fisher. ‘We tried things out and watched how people played the game and what we learned is that what worked best is for the core route to have some basic puzzling-solving, pretty straightforward stuff that you can essentially solve by brute force if your brain’s been turned off by all the shooting.


‘And the more complicated puzzles require you to uncover them and then push further off the main path. What we’ve noticed from the way people play the game is that when they’re playing single-player they play much more slowly and methodically, they uncover the secrets. And when they play on co-op they tend to steam forward and go with whoever’s the fastest, essentially.’

That was certainly our experience, although even off the beaten path we didn’t come across any puzzles that were really that difficult, just some Pipe Mania style moving block puzzles and the promise of moving light beams later on.

But it was all very enjoyable and although there doesn’t seem to be quite enough nuance to keep you interested on your own the co-op was a lot of fun. Although there’s nothing on-the-rails about Strange Brigade we were reminded of the sort of rhythm and flow of a good lightgun game, as there’s definitely a similar old school arcade feel to the action and co-op interaction.

And so if Strange Brigade ends up offering a welcome alternative to overly-serious epics and time-devouring games as service then that seems to be exactly the point.

Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: Rebellion

Developer: Rebellion

Release Date: 28th August 2018

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