Oh! To be in the land of the free. A land where a president’s name can be the same as the word that children -where I’m from- use to describe a noisy passage of wind. A land where there’s more guns than there are people. A land where– Ahhh, you get the gist. Broforce is an explosive homage to the 80’s action movies that dominated cinemas and rental stores for the decade; explosions, destruction, and impossible odds. It’s also, according to my girlfriend, a game about chins, epic chins.
Its fast, it’s furious, and its a 2D shoot-em-up shenanigans expedition. It’s absent story besides a vague quest to liberate the world and to kindly, and freely distribute freedom and justice from the barrel of your guns/fists/blades/rocket-boots/TNT, etc, etc.
I’ve already covered the core of the gameplay with my opener really. You blow enemies and terrains into ruins; zip-lining, kicking boxes, triggering mines, and just generally destroying your way through the levels. Boss levels aside they all end with a showdown against an unarmed devil in a suit before you escape from the level on a heli as the level shatters to pieces behind you.
What is very interesting is that there are no time-limits in the levels; although it’s hard to not race through the game at full sprint due to the kinetic, explosive nature of the game. It feels like the game is screaming ‘stop walking, start running, kill, kill, kill’ through it’s destructability, and the audio and visual feedback. If you want to slowly walk through the level, climbing walls with your knife, shooting out just the right amount of bricks to get through a wall then you can, but, most of the time you’ll find yourself sprinting, slashing and exploding your way through, barely leaving yourself enough time to process what’s going on and what’s coming up before you try and take it down in a shower of death and blood.
You start off your first outing as “Rambro” (yeah, that’s no typo) and each time you destroy a prison cage (left side of the screenshot above) you change into a new bro and gain a life. If you take a single shot then your bro is down and the game selects a random new one for you (as it will on all future levels). As you bust open more cages you’ll unlock even more characters to play as. Each character plays differently to one-another. ‘Indiana Brones’, for instance, has a whip rather then a ranged weapon – but he gains mobility for it, being able to scale faster and more efficiently. His jumping is certainly, then, a lot better then say “Dirty Brorry”, (Eastwood eat your heart out.). I believe there’s close to 30 different characters to unlock all based on action movies to fight Satan and his minions all across the world.
The best way -in my opinion- to play Broforce is with a controller. 
Using a keyboard can get a bit confusing as 1P uses WASD to move and T, Y & U to shoot, special and knife respectively (though you can change the keybindings in options). While all that’s going on 2P is using the arrow buttons and Z, X & C.
So yeah if you want to play local co-op or deathmatch there’s gonna be fingers ‘n thumbs all over the place. Do yourself a favour and make sure you have controllers for everyone that wants to play.
The alternative, online multiplayer, which is fully functional, and I’ve had zero issues with during my time testing it out.
I’ve mentioned specials, but not discussed them fully yet. Specials are mainly used when things get a bit too hairy, they’re massive game altering abilities that you only get a few shots at (before grabbing refills) and they’re all -as with the primary attack- unique to each of the bros. We’re talking airstrikes, sword-dash-surges and slowing down time here – massive things that can really save your skin.
The music is nothing to shout about, I can barely remember any of it, but then this game is 100% about the brutal, fast gameplay and it’s accompanying sound effects..The gameplay comes first and foremost, but the effects bring enough “POW” to each of the different weapon types that it all comes together really well. 
If the game has caught your eyes but you’re not wholly convinced then check out Expendabros first as it launched as a tie in to Expendables III, and is free. That said, Broforce had it’s final release afterwards, and saw a mass of extra stuff built into it, like a structured campaign map, more bros, and a mass of bonus modes.
Broforce is available for PC, Mac, Linux and PS4.
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