Harold and Benny ready to shatter some bones.
- Crime run rampant through the streets, but Harold and Benny played every club and dive to spread that sweet sound of music to every ear that could hear.
However...
Crime breeds fear, and fear feeds the dark. The ghosts and ghasts reach out and eat more than the boys can beat!
If sound can't stop these bad bones, maybe a little balacera can...
And so begins Balacera Brothers, an Indie retro-style action game from Merso Entertainment that pays homage to the side-scrolling Run-and-Gun games of the past, with a gameplay format lifted from Contra, but set in (what appears to be) the 1940s.
In a crime-infested city, the brothers Harold and Benny Balacera are former mob enforcers-turned-musicians, when a Demon named Nugnur decide to unleash his forces on earth. But the brothers still have their weapons and the skills to use them, at which point they'll live up to their names by unloading a pile of balacera on Nugnur and his minions.
Balacera Brothers contain examples of:
- 1-Up: Extra lives in the game are depicted as a square containing the words, "1-UP" on them.
- All Trolls Are Different: The first boss is a giant troll holding a tree like a baseball bat as a weapon.
- Alliterative Title:
- Balacera Brothers. Because they're brothers who dispenses massive quantities of balacera on their foes.
- Also the younger brother, Benny Balacera.
- Badass Normal: The two brothers are both regular humans who can take on legions and legions of undead and defeat all kinds of monsters and demons from hell, with their Tommy Guns.
- Bad with the Bone: In some areas, skeleton mooks will throw their bones as ranged projectiles at the brothers.
- Basilisk and Cockatrice: The second boss is a gigantic chicken-like cockatrice with wings, which pursues the brothers as they're atop a moving train. Said cockatrice has an insanely long Prehensile Tail it will use to Tail Slap the brothers to their deaths.
- Big Bad: The Demon Lord Nugnur, who takes advantage of humanity's weakness to unleash his army of skeletons into the world of mortals. He certainly doesn't expect resistance from the two brothers though.
- Boss Tease: Nugnur the Demon Lord who unleashed his minions on mankind appears in the opening cinematics. In the game itself he doesn't appear until the second-to-last stage, when he's fought as a boss after the brothers have taken out all his lieutenants.
- Bottomless Magazines: The brothers' Tommy Guns never needs to be reloaded. Ever. They can just keep shooting at skeletons and monsters to their heart's content, and this applies even for power-ups! (Though dying would have them respawning with the default ammunition until they re-obtain a new pickup.)
- Dem Bones: All the mook enemies are skeletons. Armed with guns and explosives.
- Eye Pop: From the second stage onwards, when the boss appears at the end of the stage, both brothers will have their eyes comically popping out for a second in surprise. Before the fight begins.
- Faceship: A recurring Giant Mook enemy, the brothers will often be attacked by giant mechanical skulls attacking them from above, piloted by a single skeleton. With two other skeletons providing cover fire from the sides.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: The flamethrower is an obtainable power-up that deals more damage on skeletons, but is limited in range.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: There's a dragon boss in, oddly enough, the shipyard stage and a really odd choice of a place for a dragon to pop out. But what makes it a Space Flea is that this one looks more like a serpentine Chinese dragon, despite the game being set in the west, and that it appears by crawling out of an oil pipeline from out of the blue.
- Gratuitous Spanish: The game's title - "Balacera" translates literally as "bullets", and that's exactly what the two brothers spend the entire game emptying on the legions of hell,
- Happy Dance: The brothers will perform a quick tap-dance at the end of each level, after defeating the bosses.
- Helicopter Pack: The later levels have skeletons hovering around the brothers with helicopter packs on their backs (depicted in classic single-propeller style) while shooting at them from above.
- King Mook: One of the bosses is a giant skeleton, which is just an enlarged sprite of a regular skeleton enemy. It can take far more hits from the brothers before going down, expectedly.
- Medusa: One of the bosses, where she'll appear as a carved face on a set of ruins before coming to life and attacking the brothers.
- Never Bareheaded: The brothers, despite the amount of ass-kicking they pulled off, will always have their Cool Shades on. And Benny never loses his cap.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: An albino werewolf serves as the graveyard's boss, and instead of clawing or biting like regular werebeasts, this werewolf attacks with Hand Blasts instead. Including an attack where it Beam Spam half the screen.
- Palette Swap: In a manner reminiscent to older arcade games, both brothers uses the same character model, the difference being their skin colours and clothing - Harold has darker skin and wears light blue, Benny's skin tone is paler and wears orange. Benny also have a hat, for good measure.
- Pegasus: Occasionally there will be hostile pegassi enemies attacking the brothers.
- Segmented Serpent: Being a homage to old arcade games, this is how certain elongated enemies are depicted in. Notably the cockatrice's tail, Medusa's snakes, and the Oriental dragon.
- Senseless Violins: The two brothers were travelling musicians before the undead takeover. But then they reveal themselves to be ex-gangsters, and their saxophone cases actually contains Tommy-Guns.
- Sibling Team: Two brothers against an army of skeletons and demons.
- Spread Shot: One of the earliest power-ups obtainable, which turns the Tommy-Gun shots into a three-way stream of green bullets.
- Stationary Boss: The Final Boss, unlike all previous bosses, doesn't move around. Because it's a gigantic skull attached to a wall. Doesn't stop it from firing projectiles all over the place or having the ability to drop stalagmites upon the brothers though.
- Traintop Battle: The second stage have the brothers getting atop a moving train and shooting skeletons around and below them. They spend the whole stage running alongside the train-top before reaching the front and challenged by a cockatrice boss.
- True Final Boss: After defeating Nugnur, the game doesn't end immediately - the brothers need to exit and fight a gigantic skull rooted at the back of Nugnur's lair. Blowing that up reveals the way out and to the credits.
- Wall Crawl: The tunnel stage will somehow dispense fast-moving elite skeletons which can run on walls, scaling the surfaces around the brothers while taking potshots.
- Werewolves Are Dogs: Why else would Nugnur have a werewolf guarding the entrance of his crypt, which leads directly to his lair?
- Shots to song, gun heat to drum beats.
Harold and Benny lay their arms to rest inside the instrument cases - closed!
They'll open them to find instruments again in the morning, knowing well that the people will always need music to quell the fear.
But should that fear rise again...
IT'S BALACERA FOR THE BONES!
