Rebellion Games has a New Horde Co-op Shooter and a Blast from the Past Coming Soon
Two new titles are on the horizon for Rebellion Games and I recently had a chance to preview both Strange Brigade, a co-op horde shooter, and Rogue Trooper Redux, a graphical remaster of the original Rogue Trooper title.
Strange Brigade is a 1930s 3rd person horde-mode shooter with co-op, similar to Killing Floor games but with mummies. In the preview, we could select one of four adventurers to play as we embarked on the first round of the campaign. Each of these characters fulfilled a classic role from similar games: a tanky short-range adventurer, a squishy long range one, a support type, and a utility class. I chose the tanky character and my companion chose the long-range damage dealer, a classic combo. Â We started the level by almost immediately jumping into the action, something I like when the whole game centers around mowing down waves of enemies.
I wish I had the chance to try different weapons because I wasn’t a huge fan of the WWI era LMG that I started with. It didn’t feel very powerful for the amount of spread on the shots and the aim-assist with the controller made handling the recoil all that more difficult. Still, there aren’t many cases where you’ll need extreme precision as most enemies are walking fodder, only becoming a true problem when their numbers grow exorbitantly. Traps are strewn across the levels in different sections and can be activated by shooting them. One such trap is the spinning blades, something I found simultaneously incredibly useful and terribly detrimental. The traps have no allegiance to you nor the undead so they don’t discriminate on who is standing in the area of effect, even if you are the one who activated the trap. The spinning blades, for example, are great for dealing massive damage to an oncoming horde; however, the blades are also great at taking out your teammates. If you manage to survive the hordes and traps you’ll face a boss at the end of the level to round out your riveting adventure into the 1930s. There isn’t much to say about the particular boss we fought, other than the boss fight took almost as long as it did to complete the first part of the level. I’m not sure if that was our ineptitude or the immense sponginess of the boss mummy, but it made for a close finish as we were low on health and nearly out of ammo.
The other upcoming title from Rebellion Games is Rogue Trooper Redux. It’s a reskinning of the original Rogue Trooper game that was exclusively on the PS2 so having it more accessible this time around is a big bonus. I never played the original so I was playing this game without the nostalgia glasses. Having played far more modern shooters than ones from this era, it was a bit jarring that ammo and health were not so plentiful. The scarcity of resources coupled with the older control scheme of cover shooters from this era made playing the opening sequence a bit frustrating, but once I acclimated to the retro environment I started to actually enjoy the gameplay. I feel like this is a game that will be enjoyed more by fans of the original game or the genre rather than gamers who didn’t play through that period of time. That being said, the major graphics update certainly gives Rogue Trooper Redux a chance to stand out in today’s lineup of games.
While we don’t yet have a release date for Strange Brigade, we do know that Rogue Trooper Redux will be dropping on Oct 17, 2017. Keep an eye out here on COGconnected for in-depth coverage of both as they near final release.
