Broforce

Beneath Broforce's hyperbolic chest-thumping action movie-inspired silliness lies an extremely polished run 'n gun platformer. Simple and reliable but nuanced and ever-changing (thanks to the constantly rotating characters) Broforce is testosterrific. If you could watch Commando on a SNES, this is what it would look like.

A bombastically endearing tribute to classic action movie excess that is occasionally too chaotic for its own good.

Brash, solid, run 'n' gun goofiness that's a tad too underwrought to be truly brilliant.

Maddeningly difficult and seemingly unfair at times, but so much fun I didn't want to stop until I was victorious

Forget your Just Causes, your Uncharteds, your Battlfields and your Call of Duties – Broforce comes closer to capturing the beautiful chaos and heroic misadventures of a big budget action movie than any of them.

After finishing the too-long campaign, there's an Ironbro mode (where each Bro only has one life) and a level editor to tinker with. It seems robust, but I didn't spend much time with it. This all adds up to a decent amount of bro-time if you really want it, but I'm fairly certain whoever you play this with will end up being a not-bro for a little while. Broforce could have been a fun "Hoo-rah 'Murica" romp, but it comes with artificial difficulty and bugs that aren't worth dealing with. You're better off watching First Blood again and pretending Satan is going to show up at the end.

Broforce is everything awesome about action films amplified to a satirical degree that will leave you grinning non-stop. The tight run and gun gameplay never outstays its welcome with a steady stream of fresh bros, locales, and challenges. Fine-tuned visuals and audio serve to make its patriotic bent all the more entertaining, and even though performance issues knock the game down a peg for now, there's not much else that keeps this guilty pleasure of a game from resounding triumphantly like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Broforce is a hilariously explosive 2D action-platformer with a memorable catch-'em-all cast of action movie caricatures. The action may be a little one-note, but when that note is as big and bold as it is here, you'll be all-too-willing to disengage your brain and engage your trigger finger. After playing through the seemingly unending series of critically-acclaimed, high-brow 2D action titles on Switch, this is the perfect way to unwind.

While the mechanics are not as tight as they could be, and there still is a bit of rust hanging around from Early Access, this that shows us that giving an in-development title your hard-earned cash isn't always a bad call. Perhaps with future content updates and tweaking, Free Lives can elevate Broforce from the good game it is to the great game it can be.

Broforce is like a summer blockbuster: popcorn action, entertaining, with a lot of humor, that catches from beginning to end and entertains without major pretensions. It's best enjoyed in short sessions, especially if you don't play with friends. To some palates, its action can be repetitive after the first few hours, but that has not been my case...