3. Risk of Rain
In Risk of Rain you’re a soldier that has to clean the evil that’s brewing on the locations you end up visiting. But staying too long in one attracts unwanted attention, so plan your moves carefully and gear up on items and perks since things can get very ugly, very fast.
If the little description made you curious, check the entire review here: 10 Best Indie Games
2. Cave Story
Waking up in a small cave, you have no recollection of who you are, how you got there and where you actually are. With the help of friends and guns you, you manage to find the truth about yourself as well as the evil masterplan that’s in developing on the island you currently reside in.
A story that contains tons of drama, well-defined mechanics and a high number of mob types, made by only one guy, might leave you speechless at the end of it.
For more info about the game, check the entire review here: Top 10 Best Action Adventure Games
1. Broforce
There is a good reason why this game is 1st place on this list: The huge amount of fun, the attention to the little details that can be hard to spot but always enjoyable when noticed, the nostalgia the game can bring and of course, the mega stereotype about the patriotic americans.
Broforce is a 2D 16-bit run’n’gun side-scroller published by Devolver Digital, the awesome guys that also brought to your attention other nifty games like Serious Sam, Shadow Warrior and Hotline Miami. Since mentioning that the game focuses on the ‘murican stereotype, Broforce contains only massive destruction, both of the enemies and the map.
Basic elements like gravity can affect quite a bit on the game’s landscape with the possibility to destroy it almost completely giving that you have the means and patience; you cannot destroy the ladders and the checkpoints.
Bros
As for the characters you play with, it’s safe to say that there are dozens you can try, though you will not have most of them available from the beginning. The way of getting more heroes is rather heroic itself: You have to free up captured people. At that point you turn into another bro and you receive an extra life. Worth mentioning is that you start with 1 life so be careful of dying until you save at least one guy. If the bro you’re transforming into, dies, you will not go back to the previous one, instead a random one from those unlocked will be selected.
The characters come from movie and game universes such as Commando, Men in Black, The Evil Dead, Machete, Robocop, Terminator, Matrix, Mad Max and list goes a lot more on. Characters as ‘Rambro’, ‘Brommando’, ‘Brodell Walker’, ‘Bro Hard’, will be there for you to enjoy getting them to the end of the map or kill in funny, idiotic and sometimes unforeseen ways. Each new hero requires an increasing number of rescued people, starting with a new one at each saved prisoner up to each 20-24 ones.
Each bro has 2 types of attacks: The normal with infinite ammo, and the special attacks with finite ammo, the number of the attacks being different for almost each character. For example, Rambro can throw 6 grenades while Brominator can only be the metal version of him only once and for a limited amount of time. The special attack ammo can be refilled by finding American-flagged crates and breaking them.
The characters have the option to do more things like arming friendlies and guiding them into the battle, though they will usually die really fast. They can also use show-off movements to tease the enemies. The most destructive thing they can do is to capture and control a slow-moving mecha machine that has the capability of wiping out everything in front of it. Though such machineries won’t be encountered for a few levels.
Enemies
The enemies have slight personality traits, various types having various behaviours. For example, while the typical gunmen and the tank move a bit or none at all and start shooting in the direction they noticed movement from at a steady pace, the dogs will eat corpses in order to make themselves bigger and harder to kill, where the kamikaze soldier will start running and yelling towards you, though oftenly he will not reach the target, due to height or other unseen (by him) hazardous elements.
If you get killed by any of the gunman, he will give a short laugh at you. But if you kill yourself and in you’re in their field of vision, they will end up amazed, with an ‘Oh!’ coming out of their digital but unseeable mouths.
Depending on the bro you’re controlling and the situation, the enemies can also run away scared (aka when placing dynamite on/near them, when Indiana Brones hits them with his whip and so on).
Besides the living enemies, there are also mechanical ones like rocket launchers, either guided or with marked target, razor blades and so on. The bosses usually have attack patterns that are seen at other enemies as well, but they differ in HP amount the
The small details can consist in those trees behind the actual map when an explosion occurs near them, they start moving for a few seconds due to the shockwave, the avatar head on the bottom left screen bobbing up and down when walking or the light of the muzzleflash seen on them when you fire the weapons, all make the game a bit more pretty to the eyes of the player.
Maps
Each map of the game is filled with checkpoints so dying should not be something to fear. Also the maps are rather short, around 3-4 minutes being enough to finish one (if you don’t die at all). At the end of each map there is Satan dressed in a tuxedo which is rather easy to kill, but it’s crucial in order to finish the map.
Broforce also supports a co-op up to 4 players, both at the same PC or over the internet. If a player dies, it’s up to the other(s) to revive him but saving a prisoner. If there’s more than one players dead, the game will revive the players in a counter-clockwise rotation.
The game also contains Steam Workshop support from where you can download new campaigns and battle arenas.
Overall, Broforce is a certain way to make the player feel like a patriotic ‘murican, destroying all the bad guys with the help of all the stereotypical Hollywood action movies most of us grew up with. For those that are still skeptics though, they can try a free version of the game, called ‘Expendabros’, based on the heroes from The Expendables 3. The game can be found on Steam’s Store.