Brigade E5: New Jagged Union is one ugly game. Even the initial menu screen looks ugly, painted with drab colors and low-resolution text. The rest of the game follows suit with stark, dark and boring towns. Barely furnished houses appear half-built, and all the outdoor areas look the same. It looks like a 1990's relic, but it gets worse. This game plays ugly too. The tutorial craps out early on due to a bug that doesn't realize that the player has pumped fifteen bullets into a guard's head. So, learning Brigade requires on the job training. But too many jobs don't earn a profit. Weapon stores only stock items dictated by the current stage of the game, leaving them almost bare during the whole beginning.
The player takes on the role of a POW (creatively numbered 345678) who breaks free to start a mercenary group. (What else is there to do in a third-world nation, right?) To illustrate how tedious this game can be, the commander starts by giving a personality test to determine the character's skill points, but using asinine questions, such as how one would break into their home to answer the phone. Sadly, this stupid questionnaire represents the best this game has to offer.
Players get tossed straight into a gunfight carrying a broken rifle and a pistol before they know what's going on (a situation that never changes). The mixed turn-based and real-time gameplay turns annoying very quickly, since the characters pause every time they see a foe out of the corner of their eye. Icons pop up after detecting an enemy, but they give no indication of direction until the enemies come into sight. The game continues to pause even during gun battles, making the game much more difficult. In fact, it's the same for practically every aspect of Brigade. Everything becomes an ordeal, even consolidating ammunition. In order to transfer bullets from one clip to another, players pull a pile of bullets out of the clip, then creatively clicking around until the system recognizes the process. It doesn't always work, and for some reason, piles of bullets can't be combined into a big pile, and a single bullet will take up four inventory slots. That's some magic ammunition.
Brigade crawls at an extremely slow-pace, especially in the beginning during solo missions. Expensive mercenaries exacerbate the situation, since getting decent work proves difficult. Players run their characters mindlessly through the jungle without being overwhelmed or shot since opponents feature minimal intelligence. Some of these enemy minimalists do follow basic flanking strategies, most simply stand their ground and shoot. Mindless drones populate towns, some of which appear to be floating in mid-air or walking on rooftops for no reason. Players can talk to them, but few have anything to say, not even the hookers. If any NPC (non-player character) happens to stand in a doorway, they will trap the character inside of the building.
Let's not forget the awful characters. Completely drained of personality, their fake international accents and the translations of sparse dialogue become an unintentional comedy. Players have no reason to engage with their characters or really care what happens to them. Minor add-ins like pop-up text that lets players know their chances of taking down a foe, or targeting specific body parts form the only bright spots of the game. Unfortunately, none of this saves this game or makes it more interesting.
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