Broforce

Pretty fun, especially with a friend, concept is pretty simple, it's cool to see refrences of movie/game characters, the destruction of the enviroment the unique weapons of said characters is very fun, but for me the fun kinda stopped when the alien enemies get introduced later on in the game, aliens are awesome, but god is it a pain in the ass to deal with them. All in All 7.5/10

BROOOO, this game is heat, play bro force with bros on the couch and get ready to bro the devil with the bros and paint his grave with pure unadulterated american BRO

Over a decade from its release, Broforce remains an interesting artifact of gaming circa 2015, while also remaining a mostly decent though fairly frustrating ridiculous action movie trope mega-menagerie. In terms of gameplay, Broforce is a mash-up between side-scrolling shooters, with a lo-fi Super Meat Boy aesthetic blended with hyper-destructable levels that are almost always in the middle of actively being destroyed. The near constant flow of explosions both purposefully made and occurring due to semi-random systems creates a kind of constant chaos that has a fun factor to it, but can often be difficult to predict or deal with for the player, which in turn can become a massive frustration factor. The fairly far-removed "camera angle" that sees the Bros as tiny single "square" units on these large maps helps alleviate this a bit, but the explosions and enemies and bullets can quickly overflow any amount of reaction time ability even the twitchiest gamer can deal with. However, this is where the game's main hook kicks in, with the large cast of Bros, as each death (as well as each "rescue/extra life") changes your player character to one of the many heroes modeled after Action-Movie All-Stars, from the Rocketeer to the Terminator to Rambo to Snake Plisken to many, many more. Each has different functionality in how they attack, in both their basic attack, their limited "grenade" attack, and even their melee attacks or jumping depending on the character (Indiana Brones, for example can use his whip to grapple around levels). Because of the (EXTREMELY) high number of Bros drawn from more references than you'd expect, this leads to very high player-character function variability, but because the bro chosen on death or rescue is RANDOM, the player also has to learn to master every character to deal with the game's challenges or end up frustrated when they get one they don't like or prefer. Again, a key element of what makes the game fun is also a source of frustration. The thing that I fully expect someone will one-day make a six-hour video essay about though, is the game's tone and overall tongue-in-cheek jingoistic aesthetic. Because it fundamentally falls into the same rough place that Team America: World Police did back in the day, and tries to become a parody of post-9/11 American Global War on Terror jingoism, and absolutely makes fun of this feeling, but essentially ends up going along with it by the end. At some level, it seems like the devs were perhaps trying to make fun of a bunch of extremely violent armed muscle men action heroes and thus the people who like watching movies they're in, except that the energy they inspire is infectious, and the fact that your enemies are all completely dehumanized terrorists, aliens and demons . . . well, it just becomes fun to blow them all up amidst the chaos of explosions going on everywhere. Perhaps it's kind of like how some critics point out that all "Anti-War" movies inevitably become pro-War films by showing how tough and masculine soldiers are despite depicting how atrocious and horrific war actually is, but Broforce demonstrates that you just can't really parody jingoism without showing off how awesome it is. Obviously though, I'm WAAAAAAAY overthinking things there. Because at the end of the day, if you want to smash the Devil in the face with Conan's broadsword after throwing dynamite stuffed in a turkey at him moments prior, you're not going to find a better opportunity than in Broforce!