Broforce Review

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Broforce is the game that I forgot existed. I remember hearing about it way back when it was announced back in 2012, and I remember being super excited for it. It looked interesting enough and it seemed like the kind of game I wanted to play right then and there. But as time went on, I forgot more and more about Broforce and I became more interested in other games. I heard a few things about it now and then, like it was getting ported to the PS4 and Vita, but that was about it. When it suddenly reappeared for release as the free PSN game of the month, I was stoked. And so I sat down with a friend and decided to go co-op with Broforce.

This is a log of what happened.

As soon as we began the game, we were deployed to a country that didn't know what the concept of freedom was. So, in order to educate them, the Bros were dispatched to bring freedom and America to the world. We started off as Rambro and the Bromando, and we immediately ran to shoot anything that moved.

We were swiftly killed by random enemy grunts in one shot.

After about seven or so attempts, we finally beat the first stage, but not before we learned exactly how to control each of the Bros. Each Bro has a standard attack, which involves shooting bullets and/or more bullets, and a circle attack, which can range from chucking grenades at people, shooting missiles, homing rockets, and even taking an extra hit. You will die in one hit, but you can spread freedom to places easier by rescuing trapped Bros. The more Bros you save, the more lives you have.

The only way to beat each level is to kill Satan. Or at least, we think it's Satan. It probably isn't but we still called him Satan regardless. Each level isn't super long, usually taking about 2-3 minutes, but you'll die a lot due to the massive horde of enemies. Sometimes it's fair when they kill you with a giant nuclear missile strike, but sometimes each level can become so chaotic that you can't even see what kills you half of the time. There are moments where the entire screen will be covered with explosions, so when you die suddenly, it can be pretty frustrating. However, it's not a big deal since levels really aren't that long, so making up progress is pretty easy.

After we cleared a few levels and unlocked more Bros, we started having boss specific levels. With only a handful of players and even more Bros, we were content to dying a couple of times to try and learn boss strategies. When we actually fought the bosses though, the difficulty varied wildly. We were able to kill a minigun wielding enemy with ease, but when we had to fight a giant battle fortress, we surprisingly had a huge amount of difficulty with it. It wasn't so much that of course these bosses varied with difficulty, but the minigun boss was beaten in five seconds without even moving, while the fortress took at least half a dozen retries before we figured out how to hurt him.

There's a pretty steep amount of content in this game with local co-op, online co-op, and a single player campaign. This is the classic kind of arcade co-op that I've always been craving. Games like Evolve need a huge amount of effort in order to get a good local co-op round going, while the same old New Super Mario Bros games just bore me to tears. Broforce may not be incredibly fresh, it is a Contra/Gunstar Heroes homage after all, but it gave all of us so much joy to play through.

So anyway, after killing Satan and several bosses numerous times, we kept on expecting the difficulty to slowly ramp up, but instead, we got massive challenges right out of nowhere. Now we had to deal with mines, paratroopers, miniguns, grenade launchers, tanks, missile tanks, giant robot suits, and anything else the game wanted to throw at us. We wanted the game to get harder, and my God did it get harder. By this point though, we were able to breeze through most of the game as an effective team. The difficulty was always labeled to us on terror levels, but we had no idea how difficult a stage would have been. What's the difference between a maroon level and a salmon level?

After killing many terrorists, recruiting all of the bros, and bringing freedom to the world, what was the feeling that we had? We felt accomplished, and we swiftly moved on to the next game. It was fun while it lasted and gave us a great time for what it was worth, but we moved on to newer games and continued playing old ones (Nuzlockes be damned). Then again, we play co-op games all the time, so this was just another good game in our belt. Not perfect, but still fun as hell. And that's all you really need to know about Broforce; fun for a while, though not the most memorable game in the world.