// PC GAMER — GAMING
Why do mech games rarely let you leave the cockpit? Brigador Killers devs joke that the feature 'added five years of development time'
10 years after the first game, Brigador Killers is mixing things up.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
I love a mech game, but I especially love when a mech game lets you get out of the cockpit and just run around. It makes things feel so much less gamey, and it more fully sells the scale and power of a mech to contrast it with the perspective of a puny little human. Few games ever do it, though.
It's an obviously hard thing to do: People and mechs are vastly different sizes, you need to program more and deeper systems of interaction, and how do you even balance such a wide gulf in durability and firepower?
Titanfall, the early access Psycho Patrol R, and the upcoming Brigador Killers are the only games I've played that boast this feature. Halo arguably comes close with its vehicles, but I'm gonna say Mister Chief gets to sit this one out—"Mech" means legs, baby. Apologies to all the car centaurs people made in Armored Core 6.
When I recently spoke to brothers Hugh and Jack Monahan, Brigador Killers' lead designer and artist respectively, I wanted to ask about this feature so dear to my heart, as well as Brigador Killers' long lead time—it's been a decade since the cult classic original game first launched. Turns out the two topics are closely related.
"We joke that the seemingly innocuous question of 'What if you could get out of the mech?' added five years of development time," said Hugh. Superficially, Brigador Killers strongly resembles the first game, with similar pre-rendered environments and an isometric perspective, but functionally it's like comparing an FPS and a first-person immersive sim—the shared perspective belies a huge step up in complexity.
"You can talk to characters in this game, you can do a lot more," said Jack. "It took years to get down to adding the mechanics involved with running around as a human rather than driving only vehicles in Brigador, which is orders simpler. We put all that in—in part—so that the inhabitation of a character on the ground, and being able to talk to people, helps [players] who are more driven by story."
Jack also argued that adding on-foot gameplay is helping overcome genre misconceptions that players have had about Brigador, like assuming it's an RTS due to the art style and perspective. "It's been worth several years of development on Killers," said Jack, "Because you don't have to explain that you're the little guy running around. If there's a little guy and he's in the center of the screen, everyone knows that's your little guy." But changing some of these expectations had knock-on effects elsewhere.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.