Video Game / Brigador

GREAT LEADER IS DEAD
SOLO NOBRE MUST FALL
WELCOME BRIGADOR

"Some mech games could be about the horror and futility of war and how it harms innocent civilians, the true costs of human life.

In Brigador, if you step on a civilian you get 50 bucks."

— MandaloreGaming

Brigador is an isometric sci-fi vehicular combat game. The game was released in Early Access on Steam on October 16th, 2015 and officially released on June 2, 2016. It received an Updated Re-release, the Up-Armored Edition, on June 2, 2017.

The game uses a unique art style using pre-rendered sprites created from 3D models, with 64 degrees of rotation, making for a very smooth yet distinctly 2D appearance.

On the planet of Novo Solo, in the city of Solo Nobre, the "Great Leader" has just passed away. Now you, a mercenary soldier, are tasked with destabilizing the situation further by attacking the forces occupying the city and destroying defensive installations so that foreign corporate interests can invade and stabilize the rapidly decaying society of Novo Solo. To achieve your goals, you have at your disposal a selection of mechs, tanks and anti-gravity vehicles with customizable armaments and special abilities. You will need these and a considerable amount of skill to stand a chance against the armies opposing you.

Gameplay takes the form of isometric mecha action, following your Brigador pilot as they run through Solo Nobre completing missions. There are two modes of play: "Campaign" is a set of smaller, hand-crafted missions meant to teach you the basics and set you up with some cash. The second mode, "Freelancer", is the main meat of the game, and is a sort of rogue-like mode where you pick a vehicle, pilot, and weaponry before heading in to complete set missions for cash reward.

A sequel, Brigador Killers, is set for a 2023 release. Featuring a stronger emphasis on story, it follows a Solo Nobre hit team tracking down traitors in enemy territory.

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HERE ARE YOUR TROPES:

• Action Bomb: Each faction has their own take on this venerated trope; the Corvids have tuk-tuks loaded with explosives and regular human suicide bombers, the Spacers use expendable recon drones, and the Loyalists have anti-starship torpedoes retrofitted with cheap anti-grav drives. They might be slow and handle like a bathtub, but you really don't want one of those things to hit you.
• Admiring the Abomination: Cephei Chatfield often shows a begrudging respect for the most bloodthirsty or insanely violent Brigadors when writing their acquisitions entries.
• The Aesthetics of Technology: Each faction has a distinct aesthetic for their units.
  • Loyalist units usually have rugged and industrial looks, reflecting their need to make vehicles that last due to a lack of resources, and their technology being based off of ancient colonial designs.
  • Corvid units are made from old cars, farming vehicles, aircrafts, or scrapped loyalist vehicles.
  • Spacer units resemble 60s/70s old sci-fi, plus a bit of modern-day spaceflight (such as their tanks greatly resembling lunar rovers). They use ball wheels for tanks instead of tank treads.
• A.K.A.-47: There are 5 weapons that are based on real life guns (although only 3 are explicitly stated to be pre-space weapons), namely Carlos/Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle, Mãe Dois/M2 Browning, Abbot/Royal Ordnance L7 (although its name is reference to FV433 Abbot which is an SPG), Bonesaw/MG 42 a.k.a. "Hitler's Buzzsaw"^note The Bonesaw is mentioned to have undergone a name change In-Universe due to the previous name referencing some old regime. As well, despite the name, the 7.92x57mm Mauser cartridge fired by the MG 42 is an 8mm cartridge, just like what the Bonesaw fires and König/GAU-8 Avenger.
• The Alleged Mech: The Mongoose powersuit, the NEP's most basic work horse used by low-ranking rookies, have a reputation of being temperamental, acting up as if a ghost was possessing it, but a more reasonable explanation is that most rookie pilots are just not used to biofeedback and think it's a problem with the Mogs. In general, the Mogs tend to be hand-me-downs dating back generations and are wired up with whatever scrap the current Nobrean government can afford to give. In the audiobook, Kinny's Mog likes to have its left leg lock up at the worst possible moments, but his senior Sergeant Kronig's Mog is just as seasoned as he is.
• All Hail the Great God Mickey!: Voltan culture and tribes, or at least the one Man from Volta hails from, places a great emphasis on wearing masks to obscure warrior identities, and that anyone without a mask is someone without an identity - as such, they often take masks from enemy tribes as trophies. Said masks are paper plates and are due to the initial mutiny against corporate rule on Volta being carried out by workers wearing paper masks (one of their only supplies) to obscure their identity from reprisal by the corporate overlords.
• All There in the Manual: Much of the backstory, as well as various details about the culture of Solo Nobre, is delivered through information available for purchase, along with tidbits of lore delivered through the descriptions of the mercenary pilots, weapons, and vehicles - most of which is also delivered from the perspective of other characters rather than a detached narrator. A separately purchasable audiobook expands further on the story.
• Alliterative Name: Cephei Chatfield, a Spacer intelligence agent and pilot. He wrote most of the pilot profiles, and his entries are signed m.p.C.C.^note originally derived from "manu propria," a Latin phrase meaning "by one's own hand"
• Alpha Strike: The larger the gun, the longer the reload^note or the smaller the ammo capacity. Small, rapid-fire automatic weapons and dinky lasers can usually withstand sustained fire, but big railguns, heavy artillery, and mortars tend to require a significant cooldown, befitting of a weapon that can level an entire block with a single shot. Similarly, several vehicles employ the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to arsenal design, particularly among Corvid craft. The Treehouse^note a mobile junkyard consisting of several dilapidated cars stacked and welded together, horns blaring and lights flashing is capable of launching a withering barrage of gatling gun fire and corrosive gas canisters downrange, ripping through anything unfortunate enough to be standing in its way. However, hold down the trigger and you'll burn through your ammo rather quickly.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Spacers, descended from ultra-rich communities forming their own colony ships. They consider themselves (and are considered) the elite of the elite. They live hedonistic, glamorous, hi-tech lives... funded by raiding colonies. Their "morals" are either inscrutable or Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad. Amusement to them is mass genocide and torture of planets they occupy.
  • Much of the corrupt regime of Solo Nobre under Great Leader were generations of old-money family who hoarded wealth and resources at the expense of their people.
• Asian and Nerdy: Efigénia "Efi" Tseng is Asian, and is noted to be loquacious and anal-retentive, especially when it comes to technology. Her motivation for joining the SNC lies primarily in signing up for their research labs, and a great deal of the game's writeups on weaponry and vehicles are from her.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Many of the Corvid vehicles have little armor and low shielding but excellent overcharge capacity for their weight-class. Since overcharge decays over time, this encourages players to continually kill enemies to gather shield pickups and maintain their overcharge.
• Audio Play: Brigador Deluxe DLC has the Brigador audiobook.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: A horn of The Duke grav-tank plays some epic rock tunes, so you can invoke this trope.
• Bad Guy Bar: A common sight in the city-based areas. Lore entries expand on two particular franchises:
  • Texas 7, described as a combination "casino, roadhouse, buffet, strip club, and by most accounts bordello". NEP soldiers often spend a significant portion of their earnings in these establishments, and they apparently get quite rowdy, especially on paydays. Katar Joutsen's profile reveals that Texas 7 employs genetically-modified human clones who tend to sway towards Brainless Beauty, and that ones who don’t get shot.
  • Tip of the Tail is described as basically inferior to Texas 7 in every way: smaller food and drink selection, ill-maintained furniture, lots of muggings and/or stabbings, things like that. Nevertheless, it has its fans, including Marvin Beck, the character who wrote many of the vehicle and weapon entries.
• Back Stab: Regardless of player or enemy, units will receive 2x damage when attacked from behind.
• Banana Republic: Solo Nobre is effectively a Portuguese-influenced one Recycled In Space and filtered through the lens of Cyberpunk with a dash of North Korea-style Juche philosophy for flavor, being a military dictatorship placing citizens under martial law and having characteristic features such as sprawling favelas, soul-crushing poverty, colliding cultures, and meddling outside influences.
• BFG: Heavy-class weapons, ranging from a cannon meant to be mounted to seafaring battleships to enormous laser cannons that normally require an insane amount of coolant, even by Spacer standards - the mech it's made for is a bizarro cylinder shape purpose-made for cooling that sucker down.
  • The Orbital Guns, enormous anti-ship rail guns the size of several city blocks that make sure any foreigner ship thinks twice about edging near orbit. When a character sees one in action in the book, it rattles the ground.
  • Invoked by the Dorothy powersuit, which has a Main weapon slot. To give this context, Main-class guns are intended to be mounted on mid-sized tanks. In-universe, the Dorothy comes standard with a Balão (a 240mm mortar launcher with an enormous blast radius) mounted on its shoulder.
• Bilingual Bonus: There's a great deal of Portuguese used in the game.
  • Brigador is Portuguese (loosely) for "fighter".
  • One component of the corrosive gas used in the Chuffer and Ploughman Artillery weapons is "tubarão" - shark. Fitting, given it basically eats everything it comes in contact with.
  • One of the mainstay turret weapons is the 12.7mm machine gun "Mãe Dois" - Ma Deuce, the nickname of the real-world M2 machine gun. Its description even notes that it dates back to pre-space times.
  • Similarly, the "Carlos" 84mm recoil-less rifle uses the latinized version of the name of a decidedly non-fictional 84mm recoilless rifle.
  • The name of the ubiquitous Loyalist Main-size Artillery weapon, "Balão", stands for "Balloon" in Portoguese.
  • "König", the name of the GAU-8 Avenger in this game, is German for "King".
  • The smaller of the two available railguns, the "Galinha", is named after a hen for its "relentless cyclic rate" which is "unparalleled for a Lorentz-type weapon".
  • One of the Corvid Chicken Walker type mechs is called "Chook" - "chicken" in Lowland Scots.
  • One of the "MEANWHILE..." campaign missions is named "Irian Jaya", which means "to rise" or "rising spirit" in the Biak language and is the old name of the Indonesian province of Papua (not to be confused with the state Papua New Guinea, which it borders).
  • Another campaign mission is named "Vaskiset Kielet", after a song by the Finnish duo Ous Mal — fittingly, it means "copper tongues" (or strings, specifically of the musical variety) in Finnish.
  • In his writeup of the virtues of the Touro heavy mech, Marvin Beck grimly references an event known as "Noite das Pedras Chorosas". Just what would warrant being called "The Night of the Weeping Stones" is mercifully left to the readers imagination.
• Blood Knight: Dieudonné Rem. Beck notes in his profile writeup that he stayed in field service with the NEP for 50 years, always volunteering for the most dangerous missions available, refusing promotions to staff positions, and becoming beloved among field troops. When the NEP brass tried to force him into a desk for good or retire, he unleashed a legendarily profane "The Reason You Suck" Speech at them on open comms that made his name a byword among the troops, then stole his mech and defected to the Corvids.
• Body Horror: Some of the weapon effect descriptions veer into this. Of note are the Black Hand and Temblor, a gamma ray emitter and 'acoustic laser' respectively. The former will give you cancer at several hundred paces assuming it doesn't just make you melt, and the latter was used for mouse-holing, creating openings for Loyalist units to fire or move through... and it turns out it pulverizes bones and teeth just as well. It's implied that the Temblor's effects on the human body have been covered up, but the injuries it causes are so distinctive that not all of them can easily be blamed on Mafia Knee Capping.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The audiobook ends this way for both Sgt. Kroenig, who decides to essentially commit Suicide by Cop, walking off with only a carbine to go down fighting against either the Corvids or remaining Spacer scouts rather than be executed as a deserter by the Loyalists and Kinny, who decides to defect to the Corvids and find his missing brother, but is left wandering through hostile territory still wearing NEP colors. And ultimately this applies to the entire planet, as even though the Loyalists accomplished their mission and regained control of the remaining security systems, they're still staring down the barrel of a full-scale Spacer invasion force, not to mention the SNC's numerous other contactors.
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: The Corvids are identified as an anarcho-syndicalist movement and they have a penchant for blowing things up (and extreme violence in general). Interestingly, one of their main goals is to force a free market on Solo Nobre, due to Great Leader's fascistic tarrifs and refusal to import anything from off-world causing technology and the economy to stagnate.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Nearly all machine gun type weapons. They're usually loud, chew through ammo, and aren't very flashy, but can fire continuously and deal consistent damage at all ranges. Full auto guns will usually do equal damage to armor and hull, and semi-auto guns can be just as accurate and shield-cracking as their cannon counterparts.
  • Similarly, cannons. They shoot straight and will damage shields, buildings, and hulls without any gimmicks. To quote everyone’s fat engineer, Marvin Beck, on one of the cannons:
  ”Not much more to say about the Preacher, other than that it works.”
  • The Touro mech, its most common loadout consists in a 105 milimeter cannon and a mãe dois (literally the armaments of first version fo the M1 Abrams, the modern day US Main Battle Tank) on a pair of legs and packing enough armor and shields to survive most hits, while that may not sound fancy, coming face to face with a Touro with its shields up is still not very good for the life expectancy of even to the best equipped spacer.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Vehicles - including all Mechs - are outfitted with cranial jacks, which generally help with movement, aim, and vision. Spacers opt for "gel", a submersive, breathable gel that serves as a conductive control medium which isn't physically intrusive and thus more socially refined than a "crude" cranial jack.
• Cassette Futurism: A design aspect was to treat Brigador as if microprocessors were not invented, as well as Brazil's historically high taxes on foreign technology. As such, you receive marching orders from a deep-red CRT, the synthesized voice is an old Audio Blaster proof-of-concept DOS program from the 90s, and even the high-tech nature of the Spacers still resembles blocky seventies/eighties tech, such as tanks greatly resembling old Space Race lunar rovers.
• Cannon Fodder: Loyalist infantries. Almost any attack can kill them instantly. They will try to attack you with their guns or mortars, but their attacks won't hurt you much. In the novel, Corvids rely on angry rioters swarming powered armor by the hundreds to make a dent, as well as cheap scrap-metal tanks, mechs, and powered armor that are no match for even outdated Loyalist tech.
• Canon Foreigner: The D-99 power suit from the audiobook doesn't appear anywhere in the game.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Appearances of pilots are very different from each other.
• Chicken Walker: One of the vehicle types available in the game. In particular, the Spacers are extremely fond of this design - Lore files state they really enjoy placing as much hi-tech weaponry as they can on legs that would fall over, if it weren't for the hi-tech weight distributions, alloys, and motors used in Spacer tech. Corvid power armor and light mecha are also these, due to how jury-rigged they are. In the audiobook, the Buckmaster, one of the Loyalist's standard light mechs, is described as a "nightmare chicken roosting" when it's crouched down.
• Child Soldiers:
  • One of Cephei's intel logs for a Spacer pilot notes they met in an "intelligence creche", heavily implying the Spacers start training their kids for war at a young age, and that there's an attrition rate.
  • Pilar Nabot is one for the NEP, and moreover, it's implied that she joined before reaching puberty.
  Her work brought the attentions of NEP brass, and her then-recent puberty appealed to the General-in-charge of propaganda.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: One of the tenets of Spacer morality is to betray anyone at a moment's notice - be it for money, power, or kicks. Some of your missions deal with Spacer detachments who were working with the SNC, up until they found better opportunities in trying to screw them over.
  • SNC aren't above this. Early in the war, the Spacers cooperated heavily with the SNC, until the SNC received a hefty contract to wrest a rich man's neighborhood from Spacer control.
• Colony Drop: Specifically, a Colony Ship Drop. They held the first settlers to come to Novo Solo (who were fleeing there to escape corporate rule), and underwent a controlled crash-landing in the area that would become the Vorobey Necropolis district.
• Collision Damage: Inverted. You don't take damage from impacts, but everyone else sure does - it's a good way to smash things sans ammo. Unsurprisingly, the Killdozer is really good at exploiting this, hitting far outside its weight class when used to just ram into things.
• Command & Conquer Economy: Not in the game itself, as the ones that appear in-game are only scout units operating with minimal support behind enemy lines or are also independent mercs hoping to get a slice of violence that they hopefully get paid for, but this is apparently how Spacer armies work when deployed in force, bringing their own base-building and resource-extraction equipment to a planet's surface in order to repair and replenish their forces quickly onsite rather than relying on costly transportation to and from their ships in orbit.
• Competitive Balance: With dozens of vehicles, weapons, and pilots to choose from, much of the fun and challenge in Brigador comes from designing a loadout that is effective enough to tackle the higher difficulty levels while maintaining a good payout multiplier.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Averted. Fragile structures like shacks or hedges will be penetrated easily. Weapons with high penetration rating can shoot through almost anything, like apartments or thick barrier walls. Guns like the Zeus laugh at anything short of fortress walls.
• Conveniently Empty Building: Averted. When you destroy small buildings like shanty houses or tents, you can see flying red bits aside debris. Those same flying red bits appear when you blast a civilian or infantry.
• Crapsack World: Prior to Great Leader's death, Solo Nobre was the bastard child of poverty-stricken South/Central American dictatorships, with a healthy dose of post colonial Portuguese-speaking Africa^note  which serves as the main inspiration to Solo Nobre, where a corrupt, militaristic regime lorded over everything. Prior to that, Solo Nobre's history was a long series of wars, with "peace" meaning rampant crime and a hefty chance of getting stabbed or disappeared each night. Then Now, it's currently being ripped apart by a MegaCorp that wants everything razed from the ground and pays mercenaries to do it, the remnants of the brutal dictatorship, a far-left wing of bloodthirsty rebels that routinely use suicide bombers, and depraved transhumans hellbent on genocide. One of the intel entries by an SNC intelligence agent that has lived in Solo Nobre for a while, notes that Great Leader's regime is mostly held together by the general understanding that, while living in Great Leader's Solo Nobre absolutely sucks, its much, much better than living in the prior hellhole it was.
  • It's not the only hellhole — the Outer Colonies are generally implied to be very third-world, Spacer raids and colonizations on worlds result in the mass torture and destruction of the populace for amusement, and Volta, one of many "efficiency societies" (where efficiency meant using cheap crap like paper plates and pre-made rations and abandoning the workers when they rebelled), slid so far back, its society has become tribal combat over "nutrient pipelines".
• Creator Cameo: Hugh Armbruster's pilot portrait looks very similar to one of lead developers, Hugh Monahan. The Buckmaster is also named for Brad Buckmaster, author of the audiobook.
• Crew of One: Both played straight and averted. Many larger vehicles have additional weapons that fire automatically to represent gunners riding with you, and some—like the Chook—even clearly show there being other people in the vehicle with you, but lighter tanks such as the Betka can be operated single handed. This is explicitly due to the use of a Brain/Computer Interface and its noted that not all tanks are equipped with them the way the ones the Player Character uses are.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Anyone hit with the Ploughman, Chuffer, Black Hand, Temblor, or AK Pulse experiences this. The Ploughman and Chuffer combine the worst parts of Deadly Gas and Hollywood Acid, the Black Hand gives the target an extreme dose of radiation that's enough to liquefy organs at close range, the Temblor will reduce your teeth and bones to dust, and the AK Pulse is a sonic boom that crushes anyone in its radius, and anyone outside of its radius (in lore) will suffer from burst eardrums and crushed organs. The inventor of the infamous "Tubarão" element of the chemical warfare cocktail suffers one, in particular; he and his assistants were rounded up by an armed mob and forced to inhale the very substance they'd created. The results were predictably grisly, according to Efi's report on the Chuffer.
• Damage Reduction: It's not given much mention, but using the crouch mode on most walkers massively reduces any incoming damage you take. Whilst it does render you immobile (and thus far easier to hit in the first place) it also presents a smaller, tougher target. Mostly useful for the mechs that turn and move slowly but have full torso/turret rotation. Additionally, ultra-class vehicles have a 25% damage mitigation by default, to represent their bulk and to balance out their generally glacial movement speeds.
• Death Seeker: Deni Haapala is one of the most renowned pliots and the last survivor of a clan ship with warrior religion. His religion prevents him from committing suicide, so he aims to die in battle to join his people in the afterlife.
• Death World: It is heavily implied that the rest of Novo Solo outside of Solo Nobre is this - the extremely big concrete fence wasn't just to keep out military action, but the fauna of Novo Solo, and that going outside of the walls is more-or-less a death sentence.
• Dem Bones: "Precursor James", the most expensive mercenary that can be unlocked, is represented in his file as a skeleton wearing a death mask - or, perhaps, he is one.
  • Steve Lichman, a Guest Fighter from a comic book series that centered around the titular lich having to deal with aggravating fantasy cliches.
• Depth Deception: Despite being lovingly rendered in nostalgic 2D, the game plays entirely in 3D. Buildings, vehicles, and rubble have relative height, this combined with the exact location of weapon hardpoints can make a big difference in whether you can shoot over/through something or not. Wrapping your head around this is part of the challenge. Community mods also allow agravs to control their altitude, allowing them to slip over or under scenery.
• Deflector Shields: Each player controlled vehicle has their own, which unlike their armour can be replenished by picking up energy drops from defeated enemy vehicles. Various enemy vehicles also sport these - Spacers are particularly fond of them. Enemy shields tend to be powered off at mission start, and remain so as long as the unit isn't alerted, rewarding stealthy approaches.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Artillery type weapons in general. They all have a low rate of fire, and some have splash damage that can harm Brigadors, but most have arcing trajectories, meaning you can shoot them over buildings or walls, and are quiet, allowing for hit and run tactics. Also, projectiles from these weapons tend to have larger damage and blast radius compared to other explosive weapons, and can take out entire groups of enemies at once.
• Doomed by Canon: Hugh Armbruster, a playable character in the game, is killed in battle with Edwina's unit toward the end of the audiobook.
• The Dreaded: A gameplay mechanic with Freelance mode pilots. The more expensive pilots you unlock tend to be more well-known — and have higher difficulty modifiers due to their notoriety, affecting the amount of enemies encountered in each district. In exchange, these pilots also have high payout bonuses and multipliers, as the SNC is willing to shell out far more money for their services than low-ranking nobodies and unproven pilots that don't attract nearly as much attention, but work for pennies in comparison.
  • "Precursor James", the most expensive mercenary you can unlock. Cephei, the Knowledge Broker of the mercenaries, notes that no matter how loyal or corrupt the Loyalists he tried to bribe with - even if it was money or ultra-expensive biomods - every Loyalist immediately shuts up when you mention Precursor James and goes on the highest alert available. The difficulty modifier - set to max, which means massive zerg rushes - implies every faction is putting out all the stops to kill him.
  • Spacers appear to have this mystique around them - enough to be used as a (semi-accurate) boogeyman for a mass-produced horror/explotation movie.
    • Oscar Allard, a Spacer-turned-Cyclolucidite both loved and feared by his kin for his countless victories and immense battle prowess. His difficulty starts at 12 (out of 13/MAX), showing the Solo Nobreans are scared shitless of him.
    • "The Auditor", a Spacer who the other Spacers fear and respect - where torture, genocide, mass murder, backstabbing, and warfare are the norm. They're known for hanging around empty/evacuated war zones and doing... something. Playing as The Auditor reduces the difficulty to 0, implying that they are so dreaded that any non-civilian forces in the area simply retreat when they approach.
• Drunk Driver: The description for the Party Van says pretty much all Party Van crews drive drunk. It describes one particular Party Van where they hadn't completely cleaned out the remains of the previous driver before repurposing it, so the vehicle had a horrible stench that wouldn't go away, but the crew were so drunk that they apparently either didn't notice or didn't care.
• Eats Babies: Clotilde Aalto, one of the Spacer pilots, turned the gestation vats of her children into sou-vides for "Spacer balut". In other words, fetuses that have been boiled alive.
• EMP: One of the available special abilities is an EMP grenade; it's highly effective if used correctly as it'll ruin hardshields, freeze vehicles in their tracks, pin anti-grav vehicles to the ground, and stop spotter units from setting off alarms.
• Empty Shell: MT Foxtrot. His Acquisitions entry has an unusually disturbed Marvin Beck expressing that he should not have been hired by the SNC, as "there's no driver at the wheel." and considers it a matter of time before MT snaps. The Thousand-Yard Stare of his avatar picture only further cements how far gone he is. Even his name is a pun on the nickname fans gave him from his originating game: Empty Fuck.
• Everything Breaks: Any structure you can see can be leveled to the ground with the application of brute force and high explosives.
• Evil Versus Evil: None of the factions here could be called good or even morally grey.
  • The SNC is a collection of brutal Mega Corps who give healthy payouts to the various mercenaries for destroying everything in sight - buildings, houses, civilians, and plan to take over the ashes of Solo Nobre with their own brand of fascism bundled up in a nice stack of credits. It's also implied at least part of the upper management really want to emulate (or at least heavily admire) Spacers - see below.
  • The Loyalists are the remnants of "Great Leader"'s government: a brutal, militaristic dictator who gave massive benefits to his military at everyone else's expense, encouraged war crimes, and cared more about going to war than lifting their world out of the third-world hellhole it was. Despite this, many of them are still willing to fight in his memory - mainly because Great Leader greatly decreased the rampant crime that infested Solo Nobre, and kept said Mega Corps at bay. And lowered the price of water.
  • The Corvids are an Anarcho-syndicalist revolution movement taken to extremes; they regularly use suicide bombers mixed in with the civilian population and build their outposts around civilian centers to use them as human shields. Many of their followers are so fanatical they are perfectly willing to die for their cause, and bloodthirsty enough to regularly shoot down civilian aerospace craft, especially at spaceports. One of the main reasons for keeping them away from the Orbital Guns is to stop them from showering all of Solo Nobre in flaming debris because they got bored.
  • And quite possibly the worst of the lot are Spacers; sadistic, hyperelite Space Pirates in the extreme who follow a Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad morality (where being reliable and not backstabbing is seen as an evil and untrustworthy trait). They are extremely proud of their numerous raids, deliberate targeting of civilian populaces, the mass torture of populations they occupy, and nihilistic worldview. Bits of Spacer vehicle information implies they've added more weapon ports to their vehicles simply so they can take more potshots at civilians. As mentioned above, one playable Spacer pilot literally Eats Babies, and even the Spacer considered "good" by normal standards (and thus despised by others for weakness) is still known to change sides on a whim to cause the most amount of damage on the battlefield.
• Excuse Plot: The SNC is paying you to destroy all resistance within the city and leave it ripe for a takeover. That's pretty much the extent of how much the plot affects you.
• Exploding Barrels: Many, many structures in the environment will violently explode when touched off by weapons fire - taking out any nearby enemies, structures, and quite often the player. Be wary of gas stations, pipelines, orbital guns, fuel depots, ammo dumps, etc.
• Expy: The Corvid are basically a Cyberpunk version of the Warboys, using vehicles built out of civilian cars and scrapped parts, being bloodthirsty fanatics, and according to at least one pilot's profile, use white facepaint to identify themselves.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The events of the whole game, campaign and freelance, take place over a single night as the Solo Nobre Concern seek to exploit the chaos surrounding Great Leader's demise. The fandom has taken to calling the events of the game the "Noite Longa"/Long Night, likely more on account of all the tension and chaos than the actual timespan.
• Eye Beams: The Zed Prime spacer agrav shoots concentrated beams from eyes of its "face".
  • With the Zed Prime being made playable in the Blood Anniversary update, both of its weapon mounts are located within its eyes, allowing players to lean into this. Additionally, Cephei Chatfield drives a Zed Prime in a quartet of side missions which he saw fit to arm with a pair of Otomo-class lasers.
• Eyeless Face: Oscar Allard, the second most expensive mercenary. According to Cephei, he "reshaped his sense organs" to join the cyclolucidites, who are essentially human calculators put in an extremely deep dream state to process FTL calculations safely.
• Eye Scream: Phil Bromlin has an injured eye and broken glasses.
• The Faceless:
  • Precursor James, the most expensive pilot in Freelance mode. It is not clear who or even what he is; His avatar picture is what appears to be a skull wearing a ceremonial mask. His description states that Loyalist, Corvid, and Spacer forces regard him as The Dreaded, to the point that they deploy all available forces at the mere mention of his name. An achivement earned for beating a Freelance mission with him (Cult of the Founder) suggests that James might be one of, or even the first of the Founder Colonists.
  • According to the Man from Volta, the tribal warrior society he hails from considers anyone not wearing a mask an Un-person and without identity. In his case, his mask is a paper plate.
• Faction Calculus: Three Faction variants;
  • Loyalists being Powerhouse/Balanced: Most of their units are well-balanced, and a few are extremely expensive but have mountains of armour and devastating firepower.
  • The freedom fighter/terrorist Corvids being Subversive/Horde, most of their units being made from junkers and scrap, with many of them entirely lacking dedicated shield units.
  • Finally, the ultra-elite Spacers as Subversive-Powerhouse hybrid; they do not work well together, have lightweight units that use high tech weapons, and rely on shielding over armour.
• Fantastic Racism: Lore states that Spacers despise anyone who lives planetside, because they consider their "culture" and bodies so far evolved from the "soil vermin" that their very existence is an insult, only good for murder or torture, and even more insulting that the Spacers evolved from such animals. Even more despicable to Spacers is that they must return to a planet - any will do - in order to ensure their bodies won't grow weak from a lack of gravity, and to breed and raise children who won't die the first time they enter a gravity well.
• Fantastic Slurs: Spacers often refer people who live on planets as "soil vermin", "soildwellers", "groundlings", or "dirt eaters".
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart:
  • The plot of the game itself is similar to the Libyan Civil War, though the sequence of events is slightly different.
  • A previous uprising mentioned in the backstory known as "The Troubles" bears less resemblance to the real life Anglo-Irish conflict(s) known by that name than to the much earlier English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, as both ultimately failed to overthrow the government but did succeed in their secondary objective of destroying large amounts of criminal and financial records, allowing the poor some breathing room as the state was forced to reorganize.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The use of Portuguese for names of people, locations, vehicles and weapons, as well the whole "Banana Republic" aesthetics makes Solo Nobre one for 70s and 80s Brazil (during the era of the military dictatorship), with hints of other areas of the Lusophone world such as late colonial-to-communist Angola.
• Flying Car: Corvid agravs, in keeping with their scavenger/improvised theme, are largely modified cars with anti-gravity engines - they range from junkers strapped with second-rate agrav modules, floating tractors converted into artillery platforms, custom-crafted hot rods hastily converted into technicals, luxury sedans strapped with cannons meant for battleships...
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Weapons of some agravs (which are often repurposed aircrafts) are fixed on its body, so you have to turn the entire vehicle when aiming.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The audiobook Zig Zags between this and Two Lines, No Waiting. It has essentially four different protagonists, the Loyalist turned Brigador Hugh Armbruster; Loyalist officer Cpt. Edwina Blake and two of her subordinates, Sgt. Kroenig and Pvt. Kinney, though even when the unit gets split up the latter two are usually together, being Foils for one another.
• Franken-vehicle: Corvid vehicles are made out of salvaged vehicles, broken war machines, and pieces of scrap welded together to create something that's just barely functional enough to mount weapons and a shield generator onto. The most shining example of this trope is the Treehouse, a heavy tank that's essentially a pair of treads with several passenger cars stacked on top of each other.
• Full-Circle Revolution: The audiobook reveals that Great Leader gained power from a previous autocrat. One of the characters in the book is a veteran who helped put Great Leader in power, and its his experience in the previous revolution that helps tip off our heroes that something big is going down.
• Game Mod: Some primitive modding was possible since the release, but a "modkit" was officially released on the 29th of July, 2019, a couple of months after the rerelease. It came bundled with a curated selection of community mods.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Why does every district, including the wealthy and upper class ones, feature identical ammo dumps and orbital cannons for Brigadors to destroy? Because Great Leader's regime was intensely paranoid of a invasion by Spacers and the corporations exactly like the one that takes place during the game.
  • The SNC is an interstellar conglomeration of mega corporations that ruthlessly exploits planets. Naturally, you have to buy your manual as a Brigador from them.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The maximum pilot height of the Swede mech is stated 1.68m ^note 5 feet 5 inches, yet any pilot can pilot this mech.
  • Spacer tanks use ball-treads which should allow them to strafe, like an agrav. They can't, but this will be a feature in Killers and will retroactively be made canon.
  • The costs of the vehicles is inverted from what it should be in-universe, with the massive ultra-class vehicles being among the cheapest while the flimsy scouting vehicles are among the most expensive, in order to facilitate the Hard Mode Perks.
  • There's no faction locking of weapons or vehicles for pilots, meaning a pilot who only fights Loyalists and hates them completely can drive a Loyalist mech or a technologically advanced Spacer mech can use the primitive cobbled together Corvid tech.
  • Loyalist Infantry are depicted as being clad in bright yellow with teal helmets in gameplay, this is however to make them more visible whereas the official concept art depicts them far more practically camouflaged.
• Gatling Good:
  • One of the Heavy-class weapons is the König, a classic gatling gun inspired by the likes of GAU-8 Avenger. Thanks to its hydraulic ammo feed system, it has an ungodly rate of fire, and the AP bullets are good at tearing through a vehicle's armor and decent at destroying structures and cracking shields. However, it chews through ammo quickly, is quite loud, and has massive knockback, which is usually mangable for the massive mechs, but becomes really noticeable if you load it on one of the smaller vehicles, like a Sledger.
  • There's also the more modest Scimitar, a gatling mortar that has a rather checkered development history. It's argueably Difficult, but Awesome; the wide arc punishes bad aim, and the projectiles are sensitive to momentum, but pilots who master it can hit multiple enemies in rapid succession over a wide area, something few of the other mortar weapons can't do.
• Glass Cannon: Several of the light mechs and agravs can mount Main hardpoint weaponry, letting them punch substantially above their weight class. This is generally balanced by possessing even lower shield & hull values, or reduced movement speed.
• Gratuitous Latin: The m.p. in m.p.C.C. (Cephei Chatfield's signature on the intel entries he writes, mostly pilot profiles) stands for "manu propria". Count on a Spacer to use Latin to try to show how much more sophisticated and cultured they are than dirteaters.
• Guest Fighter: The Blood Anniversary update added three guest characters: Warlord Kanta and Livewell Cotton from Starsector and "Empty Fuck"/MT Foxtrot from Cruelty Squad.
• Gun Porn: The weaponry is beautiful to witness: the sound design is excellent^note The König in particular rips through enemies with a visciously satisfying "BRRRRRRRRT", muzzle flash will illuminate your surroundings, and weapons like the Zeus are powerful enough to pulverize entire buildings into rubble.
• Hard Mode Perks: Two fold:
  • In general, pilots with a higher difficulty have higher multipliers and base payouts. It's also done with some variety between pilots who start at a modest difficulty level but don't increase much between maps, versus pilots who start at an easier difficulty but ramp up higher and faster with each map.
  • Light vehicles are essentially the "hard mode" of the game, necessitating stealth, being limited to weaker weapons, and having less HP. However the vehicle multipliers for light vehicles can make them more than worth it. Taken to an extreme with the Varlet, the most expensive vehicle in the game, which will pop to essentially any hit but also has a multiplier of 10.
    • Update added Easter Egg vehicles including Infantry with multiplier 20 and Civilian with 1 health, no shields, no weapons and multiplier 50.
• Hell Is That Noise: Using your horn near enemies will result in an increased payout—even the SNC knows it's important to establish dominance. Spacers, in keeping with their love of psychological warfare and psychological warcrimes, tend to have vehicle horns that sound pretty horrifying - like a low, rolling, electronic growl. Zed Prime's "horn" sounds like a constant, snarling Black Speech... and then there's the Treehouse, which is just the horns and alarms of half a dozen cars all going off completely out of sync. Similarly, the Party Van's horn is just a screaming metal guitar riff.
• Hide Your Children: You can kill many civilians in the city if you want to, but there are no child civilians. The lore does imply, however, that a significant portion of the enemy vehicles you encounter are crewed by Child Soldiers.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Agrav hitboxes extend down to the ground, so shots can't pass under them. The tutorial even advises aiming for their groundlights or shadows to draw an accurate bead.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Great Leader put a lot of effort in securing Solo Nobre against internal threats with the "panic wall" system, which separate districts from one another and would allow the walls' controllers to isolate threats to a single place to mount a response. Sure enough, one of SNC's first first actions after his death is to take control of the district gate walls so they could isolate their targets and allow their war-criminals-for-hire to take them out piecemeal.
• Hover Tank: One of the vehicle types available in the game, referred to as "agravs" (short for anti-gravity vehicle) in-game. The Loyalists - being a military regime - hew closer to the trope name.
• Innocent Bystander: You can find many civilians with yellow raincoat throughout levels. In Solo Nobre, yellow raincoats indicate the wearer is a non-combatant.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • "Mog" for the Mongoose powersuit. They're so ubiquitous that powersuits in general are called "mogs".
  • "NEP outpost" for Texas 7 buildings, owning to how immensely popular the franchise is among members of Solo Nobre's military.
  • "Legs" for mechs, presumably analogous to automobiles being called "wheels". Given that "Legs Hangar Nightwatchman" is an actual name for an in-universe job position, the term seems to have caught on as an official military designation (or possibly originated as one).
  • "Agrav" for anti-gravity vehicles as a whole.
• Insistent Terminology: In the audiobook, Armbruster's scout mech is always referred to either by its callsign, "Hunter", or as a "Buckmaster-class", never simply a "Buckmaster". This is apparently the result of the author, Brad Buckmaster, being somewhat embarrassed that the developers named it after him.
• Invisibility Cloak: One of the available special abilities, Active Camouflauge, lets you hide your vehicle from sights using light refraction technology.
  • Visible Invisibility: A necessary side-effect when using the Active Camoflauge, as it would be difficult to see and steer the vehicle you control otherwise.
• Isometric Projection: Would've originally been top-down 2D, but ended up moving to isometric. Syndicate was apparently a big inspiration.
• Jack of All Stats: The Touro mech: good armor, good shields, good mobility, good weapon slots that allow for plentiful ammo. The description for it mentions that a general keeps pushing the War Council to have it decommissioned due to its age, only to be laughed out of meetings because of how reliable and versatile it is.
• Joke Character:
  • Johnny Five Aces. His description is taken directly from a pitch-perfect and well-loved-on-SA mockery of the "game" project he was taken from and he has a high difficulty modifier for his price. Furthermore, his difficulty increase per level is negative, which means that the strength and number of enemies will slowly decrease as levels are cleared. While he has a massive $50 million victory bonus, the fact that his payout multiplier is .1 means you won't see much of that money even if you win - averaging out to about as much as the regular pilots.
  • Steve Lichman, a slacker, uh, lich who wants revenge after the war killed his best friend. He's also a skeleton. A reference to an obscure webseries that mocked fantasy cliches.
  • To a lesser extent, Man from Volta, both in-universe and out. In universe, he's a savage, idiotic brute who... wears a paper plate on his face. In-game, he doesn't trigger an enemy response until the second map, implying the factions don't take him seriously at all... and then they start throwing everything at you.
  • The Varlet is a tuk-tuk. It has lowest shield & hull values (15 hull, 15 shield, and 15 overcharge for a total of 45 at most), and can only use Small-class weapons. However, this vehicle has the highest payout multiplier (x10).
  • Enabling the "Easter Eggs" option allows you to "pilot" a Loyalist infantry and various kamikaze units. The Loyalist infantry is even more fragile than aforementioned Varlet, and kamikaze unit blow themselves up and die when enemies are near. You can even play as a civilian, which has no weapon mounts and can only inflict damage when equipped with an Audio-kinetic Pulse accessory.
• Kaizo Trap: A couple of maps have a throng of enemies held behind the same type of walls that usually block the exit and lower once you complete your objective.
• Kill and Replace:
  • Caterine Aunup has done this to her lovers for many times. Cephei Chatfield thinks she is particularly unusual because she actually loved her victims instead of killing them amusement, to purge the weak, or to attain their rank.
  • Doc Volhard killed a young NEP conscript and then took on his appearance through Magic Plastic Surgery. It's implied the reason he's become a Brigador is because the SNC is threatening to expose him if he doesn't do contracts for them.
• Knockback: A common effect on enemy Agravs when hit by attacks. But also present on your own vehicle when you yourself fire some of the larger weapons, pushing your vehicle backwards with their recoil.
• Large and in Charge: NEP ground combat doctrine usually centers around larger mechs acting as command units for smaller vehicle or powersuit teams, for the simple reason that their communications aerials are higher up and can relay orders more reliably under battlefield conditions. This can be seen in the book, which mostly revolves around a team of Mongoose powersuits (and their sergeant in a Super Prototype Earth-made suit from the original colony ship's security force) lead by Cpt. Edwina Blake piloting a Touro.
• Leonine Contract: A couple of pilot biographies, such as Darik Rosario's, show that the Solo Nobre Concern isn't above blackmailing people into becoming Brigadors and in fact actively gathers dirt on people for this purpose.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: While the Loyalists are serving a monstrously corrupt military junta and the Corvids are violent terrorists who think nothing of sending their own people to die in Suicide Attacks, at the end of the day most of them are still trying to do what they think is best for the people of Solo Nobre, which is more than can be said of the Spacers or the SNC.
• Lost Technology: The D-99 "Not-A-Mog" is the last surviving power suit from the colony ships' security forces, as opposed to the Mongoose series, which were originally civilian construction machines refitted with armor and weapons.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Emphasis on massacre.
  • The 'Pitbull' rocket pod shoots rockets with very high fire rate. This weapon is quite good at destroying groups of enemies or buildings.
  • The Monarch ultra-class mech possesses four auto-firing Pitbulls as additional firepower. They fire a sum of 12 rockets in quick succession!
  • On the hostile side of things, Bullfrog agravs come with a pair of Pitbulls by default and usually come in pairs. The sheer number of rockets will quickly tear through most defenses, and God help you if you're in something too slow to evade.
• Mad Scientist: At least one Brigador (namely, Efigénia Tseng) and presumably other Brigadors and SNC personnel wish to work with the Spacers, to the point of committing war crimes on innocent bystanders, solely for access to their extremely advanced technology. Given that something simple for the Spacers, like ball threads to make their tanks more agile, is extremely complex and can't be reverse-engineered by non-Spacers, it's clearly worth horribly melting a few families with Black Hand radiation.
• Marathon Level: Some of the operations in Freelance mode can take you through over a dozen districts, with some not allowing you to leave early by heading to the spaceport. Special mention goes to the "Closed Casket Special": An operation that spans 39 districts with no possibility of an early exit, and the "Full Campaign Run", which is... well, guess.
• Mecha-Enabling Phlebotinum: While Cranial Jacks can be fitted to conventional vehicles to make them easier to operate singlehandedly, they are absolutely essential for mechs, at least Loyalist and Corvid ones, as the primitive computer technology available on Solo Nobre wouldn't be able to properly replicate the complex movements and balancing of a living organism without being connected to the nervous system of one. Given that Spacers have access to functional combat androids, they presumably don't have this problem, however and simply use piloted mechs when they want to get up close and personal.
• MegaCorp: The SNC is a coalition of them formed up into one big happy capitalist family that seeks to take control of the chaos of Great Leader's death to protect their bottom line, secure new resources, and ensure they become the leading "government" without pesky things like "regulations" or "taxes". The mercenaries have to pay out just to see the full details of the Brigador contract they signed.
• Midair Bobbing: Most agravs.
• Mini-Mecha: Nearly all the light mechs.
• Mecha: A variety ranging from 18-wheelers on legs, chicken-legged open-cockpit artillery platforms, classic walking tanks, aerodynamic hi-tech killers, and enormous fortress-like things.
• Mighty Glacier: Ultra-class mechs and vehicles tend to be extremely slow, even by heavy vehicle standards. For example, the Lowmil tank boasts dual Heavy-weapon slots and a generous HP pool of 800, but is slow as balls.
  • Mother's Love takes the crown with 1000 HP, 1000 shield and up to 500 overshield, six guns (two player-controlled and four automatic), weight that allows her to crush absolutely anything without noticing it and a crippled slug-like crawl that makes Killdozer and Lowmill look like rocket-propelled beings of pure speed.
• Monster Closet: Some of the bonus campaign missions have enemies walled off by indestructible concrete walls that will be released once a specific objective is completed, forcing the player to either run through a gauntlet, or buckle down for a fight.
• More Dakka:
  • Machine gun weapons like König or Banshee have an extremely high rate of fire. They are great at any situations, but heavier ones consume your ammo very fast.
  • The "Chieftain" laser cannon rapidly shoots destructive laser beams. It's one of the best weapons against shields, but its accuracy diminishes during sustained fire.
• Multiple-Choice Past: It's stated that one of the failed revolutions of Solo Nobre's past, known as the "Troubles", caused a massive wipe of genetic archives, birth records, personal history, and general genealogy in a "misguided attempt at equality", leading to a fair few citizens making new identities for themselves. It comes out best in the pilot Marie Locke, who has a blank record, somehow served both the Corvids and the NEP with extraordinary combat skills in multiple operations (yet her NEP record lists her as an average soldier), and has a last name that's extremely rare on Solo Nobre.
• Multiple Life Bars: Each vehicle has three different layers of health: Hull, which can't be restored in any way, Shields, which can be restored via Shield pickups, and Overshield, which is gained from excess Shields and slowly degenerates over time. Loyalist vehicles tend to have the most Hull, Spacers with the most Shield, and Corvids with the most Overshield.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Heavy-class weapons are capable of killing most enemies instantly or/and destroying an entire city block with ease, but they have less ammo than other weapons so you need to use them wisely.
  • Artillery weapons are almost always indirect fire, and are thus relegated to surprise attacks or some on-the-fly calculations. However, they pierce shields and armor far better than most weapons, and if used in conjuction with stealth, bypass shields entirely by destroying unaware and unshielded units.
• Nitro Boost: The primary feature of the Tank class of vehicles is this - larger vehicles use it to smash through cover and barriers, while smaller vehicles use it to dodge fire.
• Nintendo Hard: Your experimental weapons shred through enemy armor like hot butter and you're more than capable of taking down entire districts by yourself, but you're one against many. If you're overwhelmed- which you will be if you play carelessly- expect to be shredded in seconds, especially on the harder difficulties.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted for most Purple (Mortar, Howitzer, and Chemical Projector) weapons. Projectiles from them are subject to gravity, so they are especially useful when you want to attack enemies over buildings or walls. One achievement even relies on this, as with a good shot you can complete your objective without leaving your spawn position.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Preferred tactic of the Corvids. Corvid light mechs are typically designed to use their speed to close the gap and get up close and personal for maximum damage, and some Corvid weapons like the Archie do great damage but have poor accuracy, encouraging people to use them in close range. It's explained that since they don't have much in the way of a manufacturering base for more accurate, long-range weapons, which require precise tolerances, Corvids tend to prefer to stick to close quarters to make up for their weapons' inaccuracy.
• Obfuscating Insanity: In the book, Edwina Blake deliberately plays up the negative effects of overclocking her Touro's synch rate to compensate for her injured arm on her nervous system in order to trick Armbruster into letting his guard down.
• One-Hit Polykill: The "Zeus" railgun will penetrate through anything standing between the shooter and the target. This weapon also has very high damage, so achieving multi-kill with this weapon is easy. The downside, of course, is that being a pure kinetic kill weapon, its ammunition does not produce any area-of-effect damage, so you'll have to rely on this trope to bring down large groups of enemies quickly and efficiently.
• One-Man Army: You are expected to be one, especially given how you're then only mech capable of regenerating shields.
• One-Wheeled Wonder: The "Grigori" treadbike only has one ball-like wheel. Spacers use this unit as explosive drones.
• Optional Stealth: The game encourages use of stealth. While stealth is not absolutely necessary, attacking enemies from behind is effective thanks to 2x damage bonus, and fighting against many enemies in an open area is pretty suicidal on higher difficulties.
• Paint the Town Red: Killing infantries or civilians leaves a splatter of blood and some chunks of meat. When you kill lots of them at open space, you can see the ground is getting bloody.
• Parental Incest: Look closely at Arturo Nemi's bio:
  Nemi put the bottle down when he settled in a cosmopolitan habitat to produce a wife and children.
• People's Republic of Tyranny: Solo Nobre under the Great Leader. Initially a corporate-ruled colony until a coup by the NEP (Novo Exército do Povo, the "New People's Army"), after it, Great Leader closed off the state; shuttered the ports, restricting trade and travel; and began a program of rapid development to establish social order and build strong orbital defenses against any interference from space.
• Powered Armor: Several pilotable vehicles, as well as a common enemy type. Classified as very, VERY light mechs. The official term in-universe is "powersuit." Gameplay-wise, powersuits excel at mouseholing, maneuvering, and sneak attacks. Being relatively light on armor and weapons (with the exception of the Dorothy—see above), they will generally net you a high payout.
• Private Military Contractors: The playable characters are PMC members bound by an utterly cruel contract (where being stripped of your very identity whether or not you complete your mission and having every bit of money from you and your next of kin going right to SNC to cover whatever costs they decide to inflict on you on the chance of your death is just the start). Bits of the contract are available in the mission briefings and lore.
• Promoted to Playable: Various updates over the years have expanded the roster of playable mechs, agravs, and tanks, giving vehicles that were previously used exclusively by NPCs into the hands of players.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: As Marvin Beck sardonically notes in his description of the Juke powersuit, Spacer soldiers love to extol the virtues of their code of "warriors honor" and how it's just one more reason they're inherently superior to the dirt eaters. So long as they're on the winning side, at any rate; defeat tends to be rather catastrophic for the egos of such exalted folk.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Man from Volta, one of the mercenaries in Freelance mode. He is from a perpetually war-torn backwater, uses Hulk Speak, and is of a simple-minded brutality that nevertheless makes him fit for the work of a Brigador, to the point that even the brutal, elitist spacer intelligence officer that wrote his dossier admires him. Also, he wears a paper plate as a mask.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Brigadors themselves are a colourful bunch to say the least, among their ranks are several NEP dropouts, scores of Spacer sociopaths, one of whom quite literally eats human babies, one Corvid rockstar with military experience, the occasional undead and, to top it all off, a Barbarian Hero with a paper plate for a mask.
  • The vehicles also fall into this category, especially the Corvid ones, since you can walk out decked out in what may vary from walking futuristic war crimes to quite literally some guy's van with a recoilless rifle and an autocannon strapped to it.
• Recursive Ammo: The ‘Harvester’ Howitzer fires a massive fuel-air cluster bomb. It releases many warheads to the ground, and they can destroy an entire city block single-handedly.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Solo Nobre Concern uses a red and black logo. It even has a skull.
• Red Light District:
  • Lannois. This district has many casinos, bars, clubs, and brothels - and sometimes, buildings that combine them all into one neat package.
  • Any city block that has a Texas 7, a legal brothel - Texas 7s invariably attract tons and tons of NEP soldiers, no matter the location.
• Religious Bruiser:
  • Aakar Singh is a Sikh, and he is one of few pilots who is explicitly said to be religious.
  • Deni Hapalaa follows a vaguely Nordic warrior religion. His main motivation of becoming a Brigador is due to the fact he's the sole survivor of said warrior religion, and per said religion's rules, must meet his end in battle to join his family.
• Retraux: The game deliberately uses sprites made of 3D renders and an isometric view to evoke MS-DOS-era games like Walker, Bedlam, the Strike Series, et cetera. In-universe, displays are chunky CTR-like overlays; Word of God states that a design choice was to depict vehicles as if the Brigador universe never developed microprocessors.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Your employers, the SNC, want to ensure that Great Leader's government never comes back, and "improve" the lot of the world. They pay you to destroy everything in sight to accomplish this, collateral damage be damned. Several Campaign briefs heavily imply the structures you attack or rampage through are filled with hiding civilians, and if you look closely, the red gibs that fly when you kill a civilian or infantry unit fly when you demolish a building.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroying anything in this game will add to your monetary reward. Houses. Railroads. Parked cars. Trees and flowers.
• Series Mascot: The Touro mech is often featured on promotional artworks.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: There are several weapons that act like a shotgun, like the Kraken or Crambo. They have shorter effective range compared to most weapons, but hit hard against enemies.
• Shout-Out:
  • Johnny Five Aces is one of the pilots available in Freelance mode. "YCS" (Your Console Sucks, a video game discussion [in the lightest sense] SA subboard) also graces buildings.
  • One of the Corvid vehicles, The Duke, is a repurposed civilian car with a pair of chandeliers on the hood. Its lore entry mentions a shirtless man wearing an officer's coat, much like the Duke in the film.
  • One of the laser weapons is called the Otomo, and it acts like the laser weapon Kaneda hijacks in AKIRA.
  • The achievements have quite a few:
    • "Mark It Zero" for a loadout that, among them, has a beaten-up car and what's essentially a bowling-ball thrower.
    • "Maschinen Krieger" for using a loadout that features a Used Future heavy agrav - it's the title of "Maschinen Krieger ZbV 3000", a similar Used Future mech universe.
    • Slo-Mo Inhaler, after the drug of choice in Dredd.
    • "So It Goes".
  • Similarly, the Campaign levels are all titles or lyrics taken from songs. A Spotify playlist with some of the songs referenced can be found here.
  • Marvin Beck's description of the shotgun-type weapons ("It's a shotgun", and "It's a laser shotgun", respectively) are taken from Darkest of Days, which one of the devs has worked on before.
    • Beck's sardonic analysis of military equipment and tactics in lore entries is based off of John Dolan's writing under the alter ego of Gary "The War Nerd" Brecher. Lampshaded by the achievement "The War Nerd", gained by unlocking Beck as a pilot.
  • The "WELCOME, BRIGADOR" and all synth voices are generated by Dr. Sbaitso, an old voice-synth program from the 90s.
  • The Zed Prime, in both name and being a large, leering, floating head that looks like it's made from stone, is a double whammy for Zardoz.
  • The Killdozer is possibly named after a real life incident that occurred in Colorado in 2004 involving a disgruntled man modifying a bulldozer into a surprisingly effective armored tank. He took the vehicle on a rampage which ended when the man committed suicide. More info on That Other Wiki.
  • Like pretty much every other major science fiction work of the last half century, Dune gets several nods. There's a mech called the Usul, one of the NEP's top weapons designers is named Halleck, the Cyclolucidites resemble Guild Navigators and the Temblor and AKP are nearly identical to the sonic weapons used by House Atreides in various spinoffs.
  • Mechs use a Brain/Computer Interface with a variable synchronization ratio that can harm the pilot if pushed too high. Spacer versions even use a kind of gel similar to LCL. The strain the interface puts on a pilot's nervous system is also occasionally referred to as "neural load''.
• Shown Their Work: The description for the Harvester, a cluster fuel-air bomb, explains that most people die from either the blast itself, the blast's resulting vacuum causing their lungs to explode, or the highly-toxic fuel dispersed by the bomb. This isn't just speculation like with the effects of the Bully laser; this reflects how real-life fuel-air bombs are believed to kill people.
• The Sleepless: Cyclolucidites were created to fix a major roadblock in FTL travel, being finding a pilot who is able to pilot a ship for days or weeks with no rest, due to computers being too inadequate to handle such calculations and the fact making multiple jumps in a trip was prohibitively expensive. Their brains are in a permanent state of REM sleep, making them permanently sleepwalking Wetware CPUs.
• Smoke Out: One of the available special abilities, smoke screen, allows you to perform one of these. Enemies can't attack or see you within the screen.
• Sociopathic Hero:
  • Regardless of your choice of pilot, the player character is essentially being paid to commit either terrorist actions, or war crimes - with an unavoidably massive body count. Without a canon story, whether this matters or not is pretty much up to the player.
  • Olu Salazar reverts to unspecified "antisocial behavior" when cornered, underneath a veneer of kindness and affable confusion.
  • Kennedy Spits cares nothing for her nominal Corvid allies, and is all-too-happy to turn on them (or anyone) if it promises to upgrade whatever vehicle she's fixated on.
  • Hugh Armbruster in both the game and the novel betrays the NEP solely as an excuse to unleash violence on a grand scale. In the novel, he goes out of his way to crush several civilians, and specifically guns after his old unit just for kicks.
  • Almost all the Spacer pilots are driven more by sadism and their contempt for dirt-eaters than any noble cause.
• Spiritual Successor: Given that both games involve mecha blasting their way through highly destructible urban environments from an isometric perspective, it's easy to think of Brigador being this to GT Interactive's Bedlam.
• Stealthy Colossus: Ultra-class units with Active Camouflage can become this.
• Stuff Blowing Up: You have a vast array of explosive weapons at your disposal alongside the ballistics and energy weapons. Unsurprisingly, a couple of districts are also fans of this trope; if you see anything related to oil, pumping, or refineries, there's a good bet that it's going to go up in a nice big fireball the moment you look at it funny. The Orbital Guns are also highly explosive.
• Suicidal Overconfidence:
  • Doesn't matter if you're piloting a dinky little scout mech or an absolutely massive tank, enemy infantry run right at you. At the very least, their laser rifles and mortars will do some damage, especially when you're swarmed by other tanks.
  • In-universe, this is part of the reason why the Loyalists still field plain ol' unaugmented and unpowered infantry - one part slavish devotion to Great Leader, one part sneering elitism at the cowards trying to prolong their death wish behind powered armor, tanks, agravs, and mechs, and one part confidence in their training.
  • Corvids, who ride weapons stolen from junkyards, decommission yards, civilian stuff, and scrap metal, are generally categorized as this. It's partially a consequence of hiring thrill-seeking pilots who'd mod up agravs and race them (and run the risk of splattering themselves all over the street), partially the sheer desperation and anger from those who've suffered under Great Leader's Iron Fist long enough, and partially because you need balls to face down a crushing dictatorship with a well-equipped army, a genocidal fleet that prides itself on its technological achievements, and a series of Mega Corps ripping through your army with highly experimental tech. They also field suicide bombers, and have vehicles solely rigged to explode fantastically - and while it's noted it's possible for them to eject or bail out, most don't. In the novel, hordes of barely-armed Corvid rioters dogpile Loyalist powersuits that are capable of turning torsos into paste - and even as the powersuit shields flashfry the rioters, more still keep coming.
• Suicide Attack: Corvids utilize many suicide bombers. They usually use bikes or cars to charge into you, but some of them even disguise themselves as civilians - several levels taking place in Corvid territory see groups of Suicide Bombers scattered among massive hordes of fleeing civilians.
• Super Serum: Both the Corvids and NEP make extensive use of "combat stims" to even the playing field.
• Tank Controls: An important control scheme to master, as all vehicles in Brigador take increased damage from the side and rear. Though an update added the option to use screen absolute controls instead, it's generally preferrable to get used to relative positioning, at least for non-agravs, as many weapons have a limited degree of turning. According to the dev interview, they added the control scheme in response to many people assuming Brigador was a twin stick shooter just by looking at it.
• Tank Goodness: A large variety of tanks to pilot and blow up - ranging from tried-and-true centuries-old designs of the Loyalists, repurposed garbage trucks, bulldozers, and farming equipment from the Corvids, and the lunar rover-esque rollers of the Spacers.
• Tank-Tread Mecha: the Brokenheart is this, being a Corvid tank built by sticking a Sweetheart mech torso (hence the name) on top of a truck chassis with treads.
• Theme Naming: The various Loyalist-built cannons are named after ranks in the Catholic church, with higher ranks signifying larger bores. The smallest is the 37mm Confessor, while the largest is the 140mm Bishop, and in-between there's the 105mm Abbot and the 76mm Preacher.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Disposing of enemy infantry is usually as simple as just driving or walking over them. But why do that when you could use a high calibre anti-tank cannon?
• Token Good Teammate: Lovell Archer is this for the Spacer mercs. Mind you, that doesnt mean he's above stabbing people in the back, he's a blue blood spacer, after all, but as Chatfield mentions in the intel, he's very much a Nice Guy when the situation allows for it. Chatfield's positive regard of him is based on the fact that Archer marches to his own tune and does not concern himself with how he appears to his fellow spacers—and if support missions are on his agenda, he gets them done just as well as he does unspeakable atrocities, much as how Chatfield goes about his own intelligence gathering despite his fellow spacers seeing it as undignified at best.
  • To an extent, Chatfield himself. His attitude on planetsiders—that they can have some potential beyond being "amusement" as subjects of murder, torture, and other assorted atrocities even if they still remain generally contemptible in his eyes—appears to be a bit more moderate than his spacer cohorts. Of course, his idea of "potential" is firmly couched in Spacer morality: the more vicious/cruel/treacherous, the better.
• Unnecessarily Large Vessel: The Mother's Love utterly dwarfs the next biggest vehicle and even buildings by several factors. It comes with six auto-firing weapons, the loudest horn in the game, and painfully slow controls.
• Un-person: Done to an entire damn city. When Great Leader took power, Eixo, a corporate-controlled sister city set up by a corporation rivaling the SNC's, did not officially exist - and even when Brigador takes place, mentioning the city seems to carry some kind of stigma.
• Updated Re-release: The Up-Armored Edition, released on June 2, 2017, added in more pilots, more vehicles, more missions, improved controls, and an updated lighting system.
• Uriah Gambit: Suggested in Cephei Chatfield's write-up on Katar Joutsen. The latter, as a genetically sterile clone, is considered sub-human among Spacer society and has only escaped the periodic clone-purges by her intelligence and cunning. Chatfield observes that the chaotic battlefield of Solo Nobre might be the only place she belongs, the implication being that whether she succeeds or dies, other true-born Spacers stand to gain.
• Vehicular Combat: The genre of the game; while the Mongoose and the Fence are roughly twice the size of an infantry unit, they're still technically Mini-Mecha.
• Villain Has a Point: For all that numerous characters harp on about how Great Leader's autocracy, isolationism and absurd military spending is harming Solo Nobre, the fact that he was able to keep it out of the corporations' hands for decades, only for everything to be destroyed in the space of a single day when a plot to assassinate him finally succeeds goes a long way toward vindicating his more questionable decisions.
• Villainous Cheekbones: Cephei Chatfield is a spacer, and he has noticeable cheekbones.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • While Great Leader may have ruled with an iron fist, forcibly supressing dissenters and keeping the population under his thumb, the Loyalist faction is still desperately fighting to prevent the SNC (who you work for) from retaking Novo Solo, because life under SNC corporate rule was worse. While they aim to overthrow the corrupt government for the "greater good", this does not stop their Brigadors from destroying homes and brutally slaughtering innocent civilians standing in their way on their mission to destroy the orbital gun network and let SNC troops land in force. This can be averted if you decide to play pacifist by only destroying the orbital guns on a Contract, but good luck not stepping on any civilians or blowing up any inhabited buildings along the way.
  • Among the viewpoints in the novel, one of them is Hugh Armbruster, a bona fide sociopath who jumps at the Contract as an excuse to a satisfying war.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You see those tiny civilians running around? They're worth $50 each.
• Walking Tank: One of the vehicle types available in the game, best exemplified in the Loyalist mechs, which are stocky and block-like like modern-day battle tanks.
• Warrior Poet: Antero Giian, a Spacer pilot available in Freelance mode, is described as such, with his art and writing as legendary as his vices and military accomplishments.
• Weaponized Car: Several Corvid vehicles are repurposed civilian vehicles crudely refitted for military work. The Pompadour is a civilian anti-gravity hovercar mounted with weaponry, while the Killdozer is a bulldozer loaded with what look like Bremer walls strapped to the front and a pair of guns on top. The Party Van is... well, guess.
• Wicked Cultured: Spacers as a whole tend to think of themselves as this - known space tends to agree, as they are quite fond of the arts, fine wine, and all the things that come with high-class snobbery, just dressed up in murder.
  • Griswold Fick, who loved culture and the arts, and joined the military in hopes of becoming one of its upper-class crust of officers and government officials close to Great Leader, who got to enjoy said culture and the arts in a way the rabble of Solo Nobre could only dream of, a la Mao's cadre dabbling in culture after destroying China's and North Korea's elite. His talent for artistry extended into the battlefield, and the SNC lured him to their cause when it'd take up a significant amount of his life trying to join the upper crust.
  • Antero Giian, a legendary warrior-poet who constantly has to keep taking up mercenary contracts due to extravagant spending.
  • Cephei Chatfield, the Information Broker-slash-Brigador, considers himself this - and most of it comes in Fantastic Racism posturing of how much more cultured and sentient the Spacers are, compared to the planetbound "groundsdwellers" and "soil vermin".
• Wild Card: Aakar Singh. Marvin Beck notes that he has no credible motivations for turning traitor to the regime—upstanding military record, well-liked by colleagues, stable family situation, and so on. He suspects that Singh might be a double agent still loyal to Great Leader.
• Worthy Opponent: Hugh Armbruster's primary motivation for defecting to the revolution is (or was) to find opponents worthy of his skill. He finds them eventually, in the form of the Spacers.
• Wretched Hive: Solo Nobre was, historically, wracked with crime, corruption and poverty. According to lore, the level of crime was even worse before Great Leader's military rule curbed the originally horrific levels of violent crimes to a much more tolerable level - that's right, living in a brutal military regime where you ran a chance of getting beaten to death by drunk soldiers or corrupt officials was much more preferable to the massive criminal toll Solo Nobre suffered prior to Great Leader's rise, which is one of the big reasons why the Loyalists fight tooth and nail for his regime.
  • Solo Nobre's rival city, Eixo, isn't implied to be much better - lore files state it's repressed by its corporate owners enough to the point that a great deal of illegal immigrants before and after Solo Nobre began its isolationism consistently sneak into the city.
  • Volta is a Mad Max-esque colony that arose from a failed experiment in "optimizing" colony resources - in other words, giving the wage slaves cheap, disposable everything like plastic utensils and paper plates. Now, it's tribal warfare over "nutrient pipelines".
• You Bastard!: Done subtly: many of the player characters you buy get more and more evil, such as a Torture Technician, a sociopath who evades prosecution by pretending to be an upstanding citizen, several mass murderers, war criminals who'll perpetrate massacres if given to them by someone with sufficient rank, and outright psychopaths who betrayed their factions For the Evulz - the less evil choices involve traitors to the cause, criminals, and terrorists. Civilian casualties are unavoidable - most weapons aren't 100% accurate and the one or two that are are prone to massive splash damage, and story messages heavily imply people are inside the buildings you destroy. Finally, you are working to turn over planetary control to a MegaCorp whose previous reign was bad enough to warrant several rebellions. As you unlock more contracts and complete more missions, it gets more and more obvious you're not the good guys. By the time you've gotten enough money to unlock the more blatantly evil lore pages, you've likely murdered hundreds of civilians and cut off power to city blocks.
• You Break It, You Profit: Just about anything you can destroy will net you a few bucks. It's justified in-universe as incentive for Brigadors to do some free restructuring for the SNC, who will inevitably sweep into the ruins of Novo Solo and replace it with their own corporate-mandated buildings and services.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Done very subtly. According to Section 3 of the contract, Brigadors don't get paid until two weeks after the SNC has fully conquered the planet. The thing is, the Brigadors are meant to soften up Solo Nobre's orbital defenses for the SNC's main contractor, a Spacer mercenary fleet. Being as Spacers are known for messily slaughtering anything and everything in their path that isn't another Spacer (and sometimes even then), while the SNC may offer particularly exceptional assets transport off world, they fully intend for the vast majority of their "employees" to die before they have to pay them anything.
• Zeerust/Retraux: The general aesthetic of the Spacers are deliberately based on 60s/70s tech and sci-fi, such as Lunar/Mars Rover-esque tanks and big, bulky spherical and angular designs.
  • The game's love of 80s-style synth, computer displays, and neon, along with the extremely robotic synthsizer voice that first greets you on your first mission.
• Zerg Rush: The most common tactic of your enemies, the most common way of dying, and the favourite tactic of the Corvids especially.

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   WELCOME, BRIGADOR   

   GREAT TROPER HAS DIED   

   SOLO TROPÉ MUST FALL   

   HERE IS YOUR CONTRACT   

   DO YOU ACCEPT?