Cash for Blood

How Brigador Critiques Corporate Violence

Reading time: 6 minutes

Stellar Jockeys’ 2016 game Brigador can be described concisely as an isometric real-time tactical shooter. Reviews have commented on the joy of playing the game, and highly praised the visuals and music. Left unexplored is the dark satire running through Brigador. The game is a playable criticism of economic systems that have set up their incentives to maximise both profits and human suffering. With the upcoming release of the sequel, Brigador Killers, now is a good time to show how the original game was a biting criticism of real-world corporate practices.

Brigador (Portuguese for “fighter”) takes place in the future on the colony planet Novo Solo, where the city-state of Solo Nobre won independence from the Solo Nobre Concern (SNC). At the start of Brigador, the SNC launches a counter-invasion to reclaim the city. The first step of the SNC’s plan is to use local citizens-turned-mercenaries, called brigadors, to destroy key defensive infrastructure and generally sow chaos among the defenders ahead of an orbital invasion the next day. This is the Long Night of the Brigadors; during the campaign the player controls several different brigadors as they lay waste to the city. The player has no way of changing the course of events – there are no branching narratives or story choices – and this is key to the harrowing of Solo Nobre.

Discussed in Brigador and the Art of Sky-High Storytelling, the visual design is rich with information. Solo Nobre is divided into districts that show clear wealth inequality, where some are dense slums built around space ports while others are spacious golf courses for the rich. Each district is separated by imposing monolithic walls, with passage between them controlled by military checkpoints. All districts, even the golf-course, contain orbital cannons designed to keep the SNC’s fleet at bay. Purely from world design alone, the player knows that Solo Nobre is a military dictatorship riven by wealth-inequality.

The narrative of Brigador is presented entirely as text: short briefings to the brigador before a mission, and optional documents providing information about the world. These are written from the perspectives of members of the SNC like Cephei Chatfield, who is disgusted by planet-dwelling humans and views anything other than ruthlessness as a character flaw. This muddies the water between fact and opinion and establishes a detached clinical tone. This is a strong choice that goes a long way to show that the SNC does not care about the human lives being destroyed by their invasion. They care about efficiency, and profit. The narrative presentation enforces separation between the people of Solo Nobre and the player; if the game had told its narrative via cut-scenes from the perspective of a single mech-pilot, it would be a much more personal story that highlights the suffering caused by war (seen in the Brigador audio book by Brad Buckmaster). As it is, the player never even hears a human voice while playing Brigador.

From the start menu onward, the player is accompanied by the original electronic soundtrack from the artist Makeup and Vanity Set. “There Is No Law Here” is an up-tempo piece with a strong beat, reminiscent of pistons firing in the engines driving the player’s mech forward. “The Dawn of a New Age” is more restrained, creating a dark atmospheric soundscape evoking the torn battlefields left in the player’s wake, with occasional drumbeats like far-off artillery. The music is used to set the tone as a frantic fight for survival, and to drive the player onwards in their destruction of Solo Nobre. The music only ends if a player is in a level longer than the duration of a track. This is fitting for the realities of Solo Nobre: the constancy of the music reflects that shadow of violence has engulfed the city. There is temporary respite between firefights but the only way to escape conflict during the Long Night is to leave the city, or to die.

To play Brigador is to revel in the spectacle of destruction. All vehicles and buildings within a level can be destroyed, meaning that the environment the player moves through is constantly changing in response to their presence. The bigger mechs like the Rat King can push their way through a residential high-rise and trample cars like paper bags; smaller power-suits like the Mongoose instead tunnel through walls to emerge behind their foes, guns blazing. Solo Nobre is drenched in vivid neon lights, but destroying the district generator will plunge the level into darkness. Now, the red flash of gunfire illuminates the streets. The weapons in Brigador are an expression of raw brutality. The player can use the corrosive Turbarão gas launcher to melt flesh and steel, or they can equip a Balão mortar to level buildings. The Black Hand gamma ray projector cooks foes alive inside their vehicles. There are a variety of kinetic energy projectile weapons like the Bonesaw machine gun, each of which explodes foot-soldiers into bloody giblets. The player sows carnage wherever they go, but the zoomed-out camera keeps the massive war-machines feeling small. The civilians running beneath the players feet may as well be invisible. This gives the sense that the player is the SNC looking down on the city, reducing it to infrastructure and a list of targets. The player is alienated from the human cost of the Long Night, making them more willing to open fire.

The inescapable conclusion: nowhere in Solo Nobre is safe from the player. Both the shanty towns and private estates are blown apart by strafing fire or mortar shells. From the twisted steel and rubble, the player is shown that the so-called safety of Solo Nobre was a fragile veneer, crumbling in the path of the brigadors and the SNC. Solo Nobre was never safe. It had enjoyed a stay of execution, but the SNC’s desire for greater profits by controlling the city has unleashed a maelstrom of destruction on the city and its inhabitants. This horrifying reality is contrasted with the visceral enjoyment of the player; the well-honed design of Brigador makes the process of earning blood-money extremely enjoyable.

Brigador does not give the player any moral leeway to justify their actions. Instead of framing the player as hero or liberator, they are here for pay. Compare this to Just Cause 2, admittedly a story with comedic overtones, where the player is a mercenary that performs a series of sabotage actions to weaken a military dictatorship so that local resistance groups can overthrow it. The key difference for Brigador is that the player is explicitly told that they are working to replace a dictatorship with one that will be arguably worse; the SNC are not a humanitarian organisation, and have no need to rebuild Solo Nobre beyond the minimum needed to extract profit.

The SNC has set up their compensation of the brigadors to maximise destruction. Every action taken by a Brigador adds to their earnings, which is tallied on the players heads-up display during missions. The biggest bounties are for completing mission objectives, followed by destroying targets of opportunity such as ammo dumps or enemy combatants. Even trampling a car or ploughing through a shanty town is an earner. The levels are littered with civilians, who are easy to spot in their bright-yellow raincoats with torches around their necks; these lives are valued at $50, payable on execution. The choice to attach a reward to every possible destructive action has two main effects. The player is not punished for failing to clear firing lines or using buildings as cover, allowing them to use the dense urban environments of Solo Nobre to their advantage – any collateral damage gives a small bonus to the cash earnings for that mission. The more chilling result of this system is that the player learns to ignore civilians and their homes not because it would be wrong to destroy them, but because the earnings would be minimal.

Rather than being an outsider looking on or a hero fighting against the private corporate invasion the game is set around, Brigador invites the player to accept the terms of the Brigador Contract and participate as an active force bringing the city-state of Solo Nobre to its knees. The player is explicitly told that there is no noble goal to the invasion, and is expected to keep quiet and shoot as long as the cash keeps flowing. Without a word of spoken dialogue, Brigador paints the SNC as a corporation that is willing to reduce Solo Nobre to a corpse-strewn wasteland – as long as it is economically viable. They can always import new workers replace the dead. The SNC can easily be read as a satire of real-world corporations, from historical East India Trading Companies or the United Fruits Company to modern examples like Amazon or Uber. Wherever profits can be maximised, human suffering abounds. Stellar Jockeys somehow threaded the needle by wrapping this depressing message up in an incredibly enjoyable experience. One can only hope that the upcoming sequel Brigador Killers also uses such intelligent design to interrogate pressing real-world issues without sacrificing an ounce of style or fun.

Bibliography

Brigador and the Art of Sky-High Story Telling, thetrashbang, Tumblr, 2017.

Brigador Review, MandaloreGaming, YouTube, 2020.

Brigador Review, Omri Petitte, PC Gamer, 2016

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This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0