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Notes -
This is a very short review of the book Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, sequel to the novel Brigador, which in turn is based to the setting and plot of the video game of the same name.
Kindle version of the book: https://www.amazon.com/Brigador-Killers-Pilgrim-Bradley-Buckmaster-ebook/dp/B0F199RDCY
free Audiobook version and prequel: https://youtube.com/@stellarjockeysofficial/playlists
Anything below is spoilers.
In the first book, which occupies the same place and timeframe as the game, Ana Mirante was an NCO in a loyalist military unit during a coup against the leadership of her home country of Solo Nobre. Said coup was orchestrated by an off-world Concern, and carried out by a combination of imported spacefaring mercenaries, ad-hoc contractors drawn from local military personnel turned traitor, and a sizable fifth column, all referred to as Brigadors. Mirante lost most of her subordinates in the events of the first book, which was in no way shy about seeing members of the protagonists’ party dying suddenly and gruesomely. The first book does not make the outcome of the coup attempt clear, though Mirante and her superior officer fuflfill their mission and survive to the end of the story.
The second book reveals that the coup was successful in toppling the old leadership, but unsuccessful in destroying the loyalists wholesale. The situation in Solo Nobre is unclear, but it seems the Concern succeeded in installing a government of their choosing. The loyalists are thus turned into guerillas, commanded by Mirante’s superior, and Mirante herself is sent to the Concern homeworld of Mar Nosso, along with a small crew of veterans, in parallel with other cells, and supported by fixers who know the terrain. The new mission is to kill as many Brigadors as possible, who have congregated on Mar Nosso to be feted by the Concern as liberators of Solo Nobre. Our protagonists are, in effect, terrorists with an extremely limited shelf-life aiming to cause as much damage as possible before being found out and inevitably destroyed.
And they’re good at it. There’s some competence porn here, with the team starting out under-equipped and barely-informed, and working hard and efficiently to gather information, prepare their attacks, eliminate their targets with generous collateral damage, and repeat the cycle. They recklessly take large risks because of how under-informed they are, suffer for it, and come out on top only because of their skill, dedication and overwhelming brutality. They obtain better armaments to keep pace with the rapidly escalacting security responses against them. While their first target was an alcoholic washout, they eventually graduate to capturing a superhuman mercenary princess whom they plan to gain further information from.
As the casualties mount - police, civilian, brigador and security contractor alike, though none of the protagonists suffer deaths sudden or otherwise as the previous book led me to expect - the differing personalities of the team members shine through. One has second thoughts, growing disgusted by the carnage, thinking himself no better than the Brigadors they chase. One doubles down on his hatred for the Mar Nossans, justiying his atrocities by accusing them all of being silent accomplices of the Concern. One just goes through the motions, decades of having done worse in Solo Nobre making this just another regular workday. Their fixer quits, unable to cope with the magnitude of violence committed by the team. Mirante herself may have doubts, but considering herself responsible for the team’s morale, does not allow herself to show it. The amount of gallows humor on display rises continuously. Intellectually, they all know they don’t have long to live.
Then they figure out that the Concern only let them get away with their activities because they were, in effect, tying off loose ends by eliminating Brigadors, and they are doing their enemies’ bidding. To up the stakes, they formulate a plan on the spot to torture the princess to death, record the process and send the recording to her father, in order to trigger an invasion of the planet in retaliation, which would cause all numbers of political problems for the mercenaries and the Concern. And then they do just that. And with a minimum of patience and common sense, her father nullifies all this by finding a loophole to send a small death squad through without causing any political trouble.
And as our protagonists aim to take their final shot at a high-ranking Concern executive, it becomes a race of one death squad hunting another, the locals variously jeering at them as the terrorists they are or dying in droves, team members slowly getting picked off by the superior mercenaries, doubts creeping in as to what their final attack will even accomplish, and when they finally reach and kill their target, still having no idea what exactly if anything they accomplished, the last two members of the team are unceremoniously blown to pieces by their pursuers catching up to them.
The end.
That’s it.
I loved it. There’s nothing intellectual about it. It takes its premise and drives it to its logical conclusion. Tropes, expectations, expectations of subversions, all ignored. Excellently written, a very smooth read, no punches pulled. Maybe it’s performatively cynical or shallow nihilist gore porn, maybe I’m dumb for even reading it, but man I enjoyed it and still think of it and I recommend it heartily.
Just one caveat, as someone recently asked - I’m not sure how much anyone can get out of it without having read the first book (which was also good, though thematically different) and never having played the game they’re based on. I can’t speak to it.
I did not think very hard about this review. I do not think it’s going to be very valuable to anyone. Mostly I just wanted to try and get the book I read last week out of my system. Normally I do that by reading reviews and discussions, but it’s too unknown and there’s nothing to read about it. So now you had to suffer through this instead.
Wait, Brigador the relatively lofi top down mech game? They have novels? As in plural?
I was not expecting this at all. I knew Brigador had a pretty good reputation during the long dark between Mechwarrior 4 and HBS Battletech came out, and I dabbled in it lightly. I didn't know they were exploring full on multimedia world building in the same vein as Battletech as well.
On a scale of "Sheltered Virgin" to "SF Pride Parade" how pozzed would you say the world building is? Cause that's been a problem with more recent Battletech works since they shitcanned Blaine Lee Pardoe, and Pardoe's new series Land&Sea really lacks the dynamism the world of Battletech brought to the table, though it does have the stompy robot action.
Brigador is, if anything, a little edgy to the right. Overall it's a cynical, fairly realistic and well-realized slightly-hard sci-fi setting. I believe this used to be called "gritty". So not pozzed at all, I'm happy to report. It's the anti-battletech.
The devs are somewhere between apolitical and right wing (though they do try to hide their power level). The writer of the books is a full-on anglo nationalist. It's a franchise that prospered by keeping people in the dark about its creators' poltics, and most of the fanbase is, funnily enough, very woke.
The devs love their pet universe and do excellent worldbuilding work with it, and the writer is respectful of it and does, in my opinion, a very good job. Perhaps more craftsmanlike than literary genius, but he makes it work.
Did you know that were you to put a WW2 battleship on tank treads under its deck area, the ground pressure would be lower than that of an M1 Abrams tank ?
Now, if we ignore some pesky soil mechanics..
If it were a 'realistic' setting you'd be commanding superheavy tanks, not mechs.
Believe it or not, if you put an aircraft carrier on large treads the ground pressure wouldn't be much worse than a T-72. With sufficiently large power plants even very heavy tanks are possible, especially if the setting doesn't have power lines.
Maybe I should make the game myself dammit. Actually, why not.
In Brigador, there are three categories of vehicle:
And indeed the heaviest can be found in the tank category, where you find mobile fortresses and entire artillery batteries crammed into single vehicles the size of city blocks, armed with various very large weapons including GAU-30s and naval artillery. It's perhaps not quite battleships on treads, but let's call it frigates and we're in the right ballpark.
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Isn't that the ground-based homeworld game that came out a while back? The one they sandwiched into what could have been a cool desert planet salvage setting. Then again, knowing what the studio did with homeworld 3 it probably wouldn't have been...
Deserts of Kharak? Yeah. They got the aesthetics down pat, but the gameplay was uninspired and the story was outright trash.
And then came Homeworld 3. Oh man. Oh man. I didn't think it possible, but that was easily the worst game I ever saw.
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Hmm. Never played it. Kinda wish someone made Homeworld but right.
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Wait, really? I heard a five minute summary of the story and instantly assumed they were trotskyists, what with the whole "lenin betrayed the people's revolution" plot
Currently listening to the audiobook. It sounds like they're pulling a David Drake and writing from the perspective of the details of ideology being largely irrelevant. It's a perspective I personally endorse, so I'm happy to have more of it. I'm still in the first couple chapters, but so far it seems excellent.
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I'd say they pass the ideological turing test. Don't take everything they write as a manifesto of their own beliefs.
Unless you actually found a manifesto and that was in there.
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Fascinating, and encouraging. I might have to take a harder look at the Brigador games and these novels.
Now, there might be two novels, but so far there is only the one Brigador game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/?curator_clanid=5608422
A sequel is in the works, and its setting parallels that of the second novel just like the first did with the original game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/
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