Strange Brigade is a strange game. All the pieces of something excellent are here, but very few have been used.

Firstly, the good. The game is astoundingly beautiful; visuals are top-tier from the very start through to the final boss. The setting is interesting; you play in what is essentially an boy's adventure novel from the early 20th century, complete with mummies and magic and daring-do. This is complemented by a humorous narrator essentially reading that novel to you, commenting on your actions. But sadly, that's it; that's all the good. The rest is...sad.

Gameplay comes in two categories: puzzles or gunfighting. Puzzles are, in 90% of cases, simply looking around your open surroundings for a glyph or symbol or glowing blue target, and then shooting that target (or maybe more than one target in a specific order). The remainder are all classic, completely unchallenging puzzles of the kind you've seen hundreds of times: "press one square and the adjacent squares flip", "memorize which tiles are face up and face down", or, most embarrassingly, "pipe dream." (It's literally just the game Pipe Dream as a "puzzle.") None of the puzzles are challenging or interesting, and they become repetitive after the very first level.

As for the gunfighting, I really have no idea what the what the developers were thinking. You're limited to two weapons (a pistol and a rifle), a recharging grenade, and an enemy-death powered magical skill. Your pistol has infinite ammo and your rifle is limited, so you, savvy player, might think you need to conserve powerful rifle ammo by using your pistol. Well, you'd be wrong! There are ammo refill stations literally everywhere, and enemies themselves drop ammo. You don't have to care in the slightest bit. Spray-and-pray to your heart's content. Which is good, because all the pistols are absolutely awful to use.

But this brings up an inevitable question: if I don't need to care about ammo, why is it a mechanic? And why am I limited to just two guns? There are more than a dozen to choose from; couldn't I have fun by carrying more than one? "No," say the devs. "If we let you have many fun guns, you might have too much fun." So I played the entire game without ever switching from the one gun I chose at the beginning, and spent most fights literally standing over an ammo refill station, shooting everything that got close.

As for the actual combat, it's all identical from the start to the finish: walk through a map until you find an arena. Trigger that arena. Kill everything. Move on. Multiple times a level, every level, all game. There are boss fights, but they're all summarized with "shoot the glowing blue spot." Even during these boss fights most of the threat comes from the trash mobs that you've been killing all game. There aren't many boss abilities to avoid, and most of those you can just roll away from and continue to shoot.

There are several non-story gamemodes, such as score attack (who cares) and horde mode (defeating increasing waves). Horde mode, sadly, is more meaningless repetition. Pull enemies into choke points, grab one of only a handful of viable weapons, unlock doors to gain some power, and spend an hour killing everything. Then watch in dismay as the entire thing repeats itself, except you don't get to unlock any new doors or grab new weapons, so there isn't a feeling of progression, just meaningless grind.

Difficulty-wise, Strange Brigade is incredibly easy. I played the entire thing on hard difficulty and was sadly never challenged, barring a single laser mechanic of one boss that was nigh-unavoidable and had an instant cast speed. But I'd like to take this opportunity to give a special shout-out to the final boss level, which was so incredibly, laughably easy that I didn't think I'd finished the game. I had to go back and check I wasn't on easy difficulty.

As for story, there really isn't one. You're killing an undead Egyptian god who is back for reasons. Who the members of the Strange Brigade are, who your leader giving you missions is, or even how any of the magic in the setting works are all questions completely unanswered. There are no characters; everyone you can play as is an archetype with a few pithy quotes, nothing more. This makes it hard to care about what's happening. There's no jeopardy, no stakes (oh no, the world is going to end), and no one to care about.

All told, I don't really understand the design behind Strange Brigade. An adventure novel setting is the perfect place for larger-than-life characters, world-shaking threats, and fabulous, over-the-top gunplay. Instead we get a gorgeous but hollow trek through Egypt and North Africa with a group of adventurers I don't care about to kill a threat that we never feel is threatening, all while using a single, boring gun.