Free Lives
Broforce

John Rambo. John McClane. Joseph Dredd. Snake Plissken. John Matrix. If recognizing these names gets you pumped enough to make your monitor screen explode with a single punch, then Broforce is the game you've been waiting for your whole life.

In a world where terrorism and pure evil are spreading stronger than ever, humanity's only hope for salvation is indeed the Broforce, a death squadron at the service of the United States of America, always the best exporters of freedom, justice, liberty, and democracy on the entire planet. This team is indeed made up of the baddest and most lethal characters in the history of American cinema of the '80s and '90s, but not only; besides the already mentioned names, you'll find people like William Wallace, Conan the Barbarian, Beatrix Kiddo, and Connor MacLeod, just to name a few.

Your task will be to eradicate evil from every corner of the planet, whether it is represented by terrorists, alien creatures, or demons from the depths of hell.

From a gameplay perspective, the title presents itself as a tribute to the '80s so exaggerated it becomes almost moving; the player will indeed find themselves fighting waves of enemies in a 2D shooter with basic platform mechanics and especially with completely destructible scenarios. This peculiarity is both appreciated and strategic: while at first, it will simply be a joy for the eyes to see entire blocks of ground explode under our endless gunfire, in the long run, it will become practically essential to create underground escape routes for alternative and often winning paths.

I mentioned endless gunfire; it's good to clarify that while there is no limit to the storm of death and destruction we can unleash, there is a limit to the devastating secondary attacks. What are they? Well, it depends. On what? On the character, of course!

As previously described, the Broforce is a squadron made up of a considerable number of hard-to-kill, cold-blooded characters, but above all, caricatured to the point of being a parody of themselves, making them even more exaggerated and devastating. From Rambro to Bro Anderson, passing through Brommando to Brodell Walker (note the distorted names to remind of this supreme allegiance to the forces of good), each one must be unlocked by saving prisoners from level to level, and each will have a type of attack often entirely different from the previous one; from machine guns, to sawed-off shotguns, lasers, and gatling to knives, swords, whips, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, or even bare hands, with even more devastating secondary attacks.
I've also saved the two most important features of the game for last: first and foremost, the difficulty of the game, mainly due to the instant death of various characters. It always starts with one life, and each liberated soldier increases both the count towards unlocking the next Bro and the number of available lives by one. Upon death, you restart from the last checkpoint, while at zero lives, you must restart the level until you can finally kill the devil waiting at the end of the level and be rescued by the helicopter, which will take you out of the hot zone.

Lastly, the variable of "choosing" the Bros, which essentially doesn't exist. The game, in fact, upon freeing each brother, forces us to change the currently used one to a completely random one, forcing the player to exploit the advantages of the new character but also to compensate for the weaknesses each possesses; if indeed Brade's sword (a clear reference to Wesley Snipes in "Blade") proves extremely useful in battles with many enemies and a high presence of potentially lethal explosives, its almost non-existent range will complicate life for the player in situations where the only thing needed is a heavy dose of ultra-lethal lead.

Any defects? A not always well-balanced game difficulty, with damn tough levels and/or boss battles preceding much simpler ones and often too marked differences between one Bro and another (those who get along well with this title will learn to hate Indiana Brones, ed.).

Nothing more to say, we are in the presence of a very fun side-scrolling shooter, which will become an addiction for those who, like myself, adore the over-the-top, gaudy, and immortal masculinity of American action movies from the '80s and '90s.

Now excuse me, I'm off to export a bit of democracy for another hour.