The Light Brigade review: Sunday school, with guns and explosions

I was expecting lots of gunplay in The Light Brigade: a first-person shooter set in dark, dream-like environments illustrated with a surreal graphic novel-like aesthetic. I was expecting lots of bad guys, lots of creeping around, lots of aiming and firing, lots of reloading. All of which this game delivered. What I didn’t expect was so much praying. As in, literally, placing the palms of your hands together and pointing your fingers skywards, appealing to some unknown deity way up in the virtual clouds. 

This simple gesture, which triggers a satisfying rumble from the controllers, must be performed throughout the experience. You pray to open doors, advance conversations, return from the dead, and scan environments for villains and objects. In fact it’s the very first thing we do: the game begins with the player facing a large stone entryway, text ahead of us reading “let us pray.” Like being forced to attend Sunday school, we must perform this gesture again and again; unlike church, we get to fire guns and blow stuff up.

What we don’t get is anything vaguely resembling an interesting narrative. I like some of the atmospheric and environmental touches, for instance the way mist permeates each location, imbuing it with mysterious qualities, and how in certain areas pathways form from floating rock pieces, as if assembled in real-time by the gods. These embellishments paint a world situated out of time and out of mind: an alternate battle-filled spiritual universe from a far-flung corner of the cosmos, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. The problem is we see this stuff again and again and soon take it for granted.

One of the key areas—which we visit after our first forced prayer—is a temple-like space, part indoors and part out, where a woman in strange old fashioned garb—including a cape and white face mask—stands next to floating orange rocks. After we die we’re returned to this saint-like character, whose company I didn’t find intriguing the first time let alone the 30th or 50th. The objective of the game is to make your way through various procedurally generated levels, swiping loot and clearing them of baddies. Souls you collect can be purified at altars (this game is absolutely drenched in religious overtones) and help your character’s progression.

After you die, you can re-enter the environment—now drained of colour—where you perished and retrieve your body, which can be reactivated by (you guessed it) more praying. The Light Brigade’s otherworldly look gave the developers at Funktronic Labs an easy justification for abandoning realistic gunplay, like in the zany and bling-filled Fracked, a first-person shooter that prioritizes energy and adrenaline. But the devs decided against that and even made realism (when it comes to weaponry) a selling point, advertising The Light Brigade as “a roguelike VR shooter with realistic gunplay and immersive light magic.” In terms of weapons mechanics the end result is pretty good: certainly not onerous and fidgety, like Into the Radio—another dreamy shooter aspiring for gunplay realism. 

The Light Brigade’s gameplay, for me, started strong but I lost interest pretty quickly. The story, as previously stated, is borderline non-existent, and all that religious bilge wore me down. The production design, while impressive, loses its wow factor, because the developers gave the keys to the kingdom to the computer and got it to do the work. There’s a place for procedurally generated environments and the infinite gameplay they enable. But here you can feel the randomness, the lack of sculpture, the lack of human touch, the persistence of same-old same-old. The Light Brigade offers a virtual eternity of shooting and praying—but for me, six or seven hours was enough.