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‘Strange Brigade’ is Supernatural Serial Adventure Done Proper

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Brigade

Rebellion Development’s latest, Strange Brigade is a charming and fun-filled surprise whose aesthetic and playful nature makes for a great time spent. Ultimately, watching the supernatural, puzzle solving and firepower take center stage is a dang joy to experience.

Rebellion Developments is the team primarily known for their Sniper Elite series as well as its Zombie Army Trilogy. While, those titles are really great and inventive in their fields, they are both voiced with a lot more serious tone. With Strange Brigade, the team seems to have exercised some of their tongue-in-cheek, fun demons, to extraordinary result.

This game is deeply rooted in the cliffhanger reliant serial adventures of the 1930s. These pictures were usually played at movie houses and were catered to kids in a double-feature format. As before mentioned, these were all reliant on cliffhanger endings that made sure audiences came back.

Both the look and charm of those serial adventures is captured carefully in Strange Brigade, right down to the bravado filled narrator and cliffhanger stapled levels.

In Strange Brigade, you take on the role of one of four adventurers (more characters available with DLC) and head out for a rip-roaring supernatural adventure in Egypt. Turns out the Witch Queen Seteki has been unleashed from her tomb and is wreaking havoc on the land with her army of monsters.

You can choose to go at it alone in single player, or team up with three other players in online co-op. It’s a lot more fun to have a go with your cast of online buddies, but single player offers just as much fun if that is your thing.

Brigade

The game offers a cast of adventurers to choose from in the form of Archeologist, Archimedes de Quincey, Marksman Frank Fairburne, Maasai warrior Nalangu Rushida, and Mechanic Gracie Braithwaite. Each character comes with special abilities that they are free to unleash when they have collected enough souls on the battlefield.

Characters each have their unique feel and approach to battle. Some focusing on brute force while others choose to roll with sorcery or marksmanship. Combining character play styles is a blast with a team, and imperative in later more difficult levels.

Levels consist of lots of shooting, some rewarding exploration and some fun puzzle solving work. The combo makes for a formula that doesn’t get stale easily.

What would all that adventuring be without a bit of treasure throw into the mix? Well, folks braving traps and going that little extra distance in solving some light brain teasers, and you will be rewarded with all kinds of treasures to either aid in your firepower or assist in leveling up your character’s special abilities.

Strange Brigade hosts a nice variety of monsters along the way too. Giant scorpions, mummies, Minotaur and more await you and your team around every turn.

The narrator is a cornerstone of the age the game captures so well. This guy not only narrates the story but also lends his voice along the way to give hints if you are stuck, and even goes so far as telling you to pause the game if you step away from the controller. He is a bit hilariously bossy at times on certain matters. It’s small special moments and additives like this that make Strange Brigade as fun as it is.

Strange Brigade is proper adventure done right. All the serial adventures it is paying homage to in scope and character is done with a playful reverence for the 1930 adventures and the offbeat silliness is a nice change of pace. Gather some friends and give this supernatural title a go.

Strange Brigade is out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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