Rest in Peace, Bro: Thoughts on Broforce

American Bravado is fun to parade around. I’m not even from this country, yet I can’t help but chime in with the “Amuuurika, hell yeah”s of my more patriotic friends. That, combined with the numerous parodies of America’s best Action Heroes, is the selling point of Broforce, a Steam game currently in Early Access.

Broforce is an action platformer, where you run and jump through non-descript “foreign” jungles and towns, killing terrorists while on a mission to defeat the devil (seriously). You do so with the titular Broforce, a squad of Action Heroes that have nimbly avoided copyright infringement through names like “the Brominator”, “Bro in Black”, and “Bro Max”. Each character has special characteristics that make them stand out from the rest as you blast your way through the game’s destructable environments.

My favorite part in my 5-ish hours in Broforce is the unpredictability of it all. It truly makes the game’s emergent gameplay shine. As you go through a level, you find prisoners that you can save. Each prisoner gives you an extra life, but it also randomly switches you out to another one of your Broforce members. This small detail causes you to dramatically alter your strategy based on the level at hand.

You may be blastering your way through enemies as Bruce Willis, then all of a sudden find yourself switched to Indiana Jones. His whip doesn’t do much damage, but he has a limited flare gun that packs a punch, and most importantly, his pickaxe can quickly destroy blocks in the environment. Now your strategy shifts, and you find yourself destroying platforms and explosive canisters underneath your enemies, causing them to fall to their death, all the while swing yourself about on your whip.

These different scenarios make replaying through levels all the more fun, just to see what characters you get and how you can get them through a level. It also makes you ponder whether or not you should actually save a prisoner to get the extra life — do you really want to sacrifice the Bro you currently have’s time-travel powers to save another Bro? What if you get a melee character in a level that nearly demands a ranged weapon? These on the fly choices make Broforce shine.

One pet peeve I have, however, is that sometimes during boss levels, you’ll find yourself stuck with a Bro that really doesn’t work with the boss at hand. If you can beat the Helicarrier Boss as Cherry Broling, I gave you a hefty bro-salute, because it seems damn-near impossible.

Besides that, the game feels smooth as butter to play, easily staying within 60 FPS. It also has a charming pixelated art style, and though the game can sometimes be filled to the brim with explosions galore, it remains relatively easy to keep an eye on where your character is — though I sometimes stood still so as not to walk into the rube goldberg-like cacophony of chained exploding canisters surrounding me.

So check out Broforce! They have a pretty constant stream of updates, and it was definitely worth its price with the time I’ve gotten from it. And I still haven’t even touched the multiplayer aspects of the game yet.

Have you played Broforce? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments below!