"Welcome Brigador. Great Leader is dead. Solo Nobre must fall. Here is your contract..."

Brigador is the novelized tie-in to my Game of the Year, Brigador a tactical mech action game with a kicking synthwave vibe. This novel covers the events of the night of great leader's death from three perspectives. Armbruster is a recon mech pilot, who turns on his comrades and takes the brigador's contract to destroy Solo Nobre's defenses so it can be reclaimed by the corporation. Captain Blake is an efficient officer trying to carry out her mission in the midst of a massive uprising. Private Kinny is a young recruit with a balky powersuit, trying to stay alive with nothing more than a pair of 8mm machine guns and a vague loyalty to his squad.

There three of them stomp across the slums of Solo Nobre, an isolationist planet a lot like Space North Korea, dealing out high velocity death to anyone unfortunate enough to come in their path. Kinny is the main protagonist, and Buckmaster has a real talent for describing the desperate chaos of a firefight (he's a combat veteran), the superiority of the powered armor suits over human infantry and the improvised technicals of the Corvid rebels, and the building stomping, 105mm cannon blasting, destructive power of Captain Blake's Touro heavy mech.

This is pretty solid milSF, with a few moments that rise above the average. It definitely is superior to Marko Kloos' inexplicably popular Frontline series, even if the 24 hour timeline compresses what can be done with characterization. The thing that dropped this a star for me (and I hate to say it) is that the novel wasn't very Brigador. Videogame tie-in novel is not a medium that gets a lot of respect, but part of the reason why I love the game Brigador is it's event horizon-black sense of humor. Much of the setting is conveyed in snippets of lore about weapons and vehicles, which you buy with money you earn by indiscriminate firefights in populated areas, and the entries are funny. e.g. "This is one of the rare Spacer vehicles you can get good video of if you know a guy. You don't want to know a guy. I am that guy. --Marvin Beck" (who writes a lot of the entries). The novel mostly plays it straight. This is a serious business, people are really suffering, death happens all around you. Armbruster and the spacer who shows up towards the end have some of the proper attitude, but (and it's weird to write this), this novel cares too much.

Still, good enough that I grabbed Buckmaster's novellas on the chance he loosens up with a little more space to write in.