Tropa de Elite

It’s not much of a challenge to make a video game difficult just for the sake of it, because everyone can fill a level with spikes and enemies and call it a day. However, making the experience both difficult and rewarding is something else entirely, not to mention the fact that the gameplay must be designed in such a way as to feel like you can master it with enough practice and dedication.

Tropa de Elite is a very challenging platformer in which you have a very simple purpose: stay alive for as long as you can and make it to the next stage. There’s nothing special about the game in regards to mechanics, so if you played a platformer before you should have an easy time figuring out what to do and how. On the other hand, actually beating the levels is an entirely different thing.

To begin with, you play the role of some kind of special forces guy, although there’s not much of a story to worry about along the way. Hence, you can easily ignore this entire aspect and focus on survival only, which is easier said than done. Before you can learn how to properly avoid the traps and time your attacks, you first have to get familiar with the controls and the way the character reacts to your input.

Although most platformers punish players for not being able to control and measure their jumps, Tropa de Elite takes the cake in this regard, because there’s only so much you can mess up without slipping or missing the target entirely. It can be very frustrating, especially since this is theoretically the easy part of the game. Thus, you also have to worry about enemies that keep shooting at you on a regular basis.

In fact, they can be figured out from the first few seconds, since their only power is to shoot at certain intervals. However, the challenge increases when there are multiple enemies shooting at once, because you have to avoid all of them and shoot back at the same time. It’s very tough and annoying, especially if you are new to the genre and are not accustomed to such harsh mechanics.

All things considered, Tropa de Elite is great if you want to test your patience, but it obviously lacks any kind of originality. Hence, it’s a cute distraction and a nice stress builder, but it would have been nice to see some kind of purpose to the whole thing.