Early Access plans for Brigador Killers

A couple of weeks ago during the Convergence Games Showcase, we revealed that Early Access for Brigador Killers will begin on August 20th 2026. We're going to go over a few details about it today. But first things first: here's the Makeup and Vanity Set song used in the recent trailer, called True Believer.

This track is also heard in the Vandenberg level in the demo. Now onto the topic of Early Access and what to expect.

Release timing and pricing

Brigador Killers is expected to go live on Steam at approximately 11:00 PDT / 14:00 EDT / 19:00 BST / 20:00 CEST / 04:00+1 AEST on Thursday August 20th 2026. The base game will retail at the following prices in these major currencies:

• 🇺🇲 24.99 USD

• 🇪🇺 19.99 EUR

• 🇬🇧 17.99 GBP

• 🇦🇺 35.99 AUD

• 🇯🇵 2400 JPY

• 🇰🇷 20550 KRW

• 🇨🇳 85 CNY

• 🇷🇺 750 RUB*

[* This news post originally listed this value at 500 RUB – this was an unintended error on our part that was based on old pricing information specifically for that currency.]

This is not the full list of currencies. Other regions like CIS, SE Asia and Latin America will have their own localized prices. There will be a launch discount of 10% for the first two weeks.

Those of you who have supported us on Itch should receive your Steam keys shortly before the public release. Be sure to check your email associated with your Itch account; you should receive a notification that a key is ready to claim. We will announce when those keys are ready through here and on social media.

We expect to be in Early Access for the rest of 2026 and do not have a date for 1.0 yet.

Bundles

The base game will be bundled with the official album by Makeup and Vanity Set (44 tracks, or about 1 hour and 40 minutes of music) and the audiobook Brigador Killers: Pilgrim (over 9 hours of narration by Ryan Cooper) in the Brigador Deluxe Bundle. The OST will cost 9.99 USD on its own, while the audiobook will cost 4.99 USD. This bundle will have a permanent 20% discount. Bundle discounts are separate to launch discounts but they stack, meaning that if you buy the Brigador Deluxe Bundle during the two week launch window, you will receive 30% off, or approximately 28 USD for everything.

There will also be the Double Deluxe Bundle which is the deluxe editions of both Brigador and Brigador Killers (all games + all OSTS + all audiobooks). This bundle is 10% off everything. Unfortunately we are unable to run a discount for the previous game at the same time as Brigador Killers' launch window. However, the first game goes on discount very frequently (and very soon in fact) and after launch is settled we will make sure that both games go on discount at the same time.

All of these bundles will be a "complete the set" type of bundle, meaning if you already own some items in this bundle, you will pay for and receive only the items you don't already own at the bundle discount.

These two bundles will also be available on GOG at the same price points.

Platforms and languages

At the beginning of Early Access, Brigador Killers will be available officially on Windows on Steam, GOG and Itch. Dedicated Linux support is expected later but we do not have an exact date yet. We know through reviews and forum posts that several Linux users have had success running the game on their own setups, such as through WINE, but your mileage may vary depending on your distro. MacOS support is not expected at this time but we are not ruling it out entirely.

The game will be in English at launch. French, German, Japanese, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish translations are in the works. Assuming things go well, more languages will be added to the list.

Controller support and Steam deck

At launch we strongly suggest you play on keyboard and mouse for the best experience. Playing on a gamepad is possible, but it is not ideal because certain binds may not be configured or not available on controllers or the Steam Deck, making gameplay difficult.

Like in the demo, all binds for keyboard or controller can be customized via pausing the game and going to SETTINGS > BINDS/CONTROLLER. If action feels too frantic, the GAME SPEED slider under SETTINGS > GENERAL also exists, and can be dropped to 50%.

Demo save data will not carry over

No progress from the demo build will carry over to the Early Access build due to how the campaign is being restructured. We do not want players to miss important narrative beats, nor do we want to introduce all sorts of problems by allowing players to import data from the demo. Those of you familiar with modding the game via the debug panel and know how to enable devmode are more than welcome to tinker – just be mindful to save a backup of the relevant files in case you brick things in the process of doing so.

As we go through Early Access, progression wipes may occur as a result of restructuring the game. We hope to keep these to as few as possible. If and when it is expected to happen we will warn you all in advance.

What's going to be new since the demo?

We want to keep to the broad strokes to avoid spoilers. The narrative from the demo ended on an explosive note before magically whisking the player to the garage. Early Access expands this narrative campaign further. The player is taken into the dark belly of Mar Nosso with what's left of Team Anchor and has to fight their way out with whatever they can get their hands on. This segment will be about five new missions using new tilesets.

The point of these missions is not only to further the story but also to get the player used to the moment-to-moment friction of infantry combat and inventory management. Eventually the player will return to a garage-like experience after getting through the undercity.

Most of the missions that were in the demo will reappear, but they will have been adjusted or even remixed. For example Crow's Field will still serve as an early salvage mission where you can go in with nothing and where one of three enemy factions appear, but where you spawn in and exit from will differ. Other missions may have different objectives entirely.

In terms of visuals, there will still be some placeholder art and temp MS Paint art present, but they are being replaced. You can expect to see some new character portraits and item renders.

The UI & UX has had a small number of changes since the demo. Inspecting weapons will show weapon stats and required ammo type at a glance in addition to the text description. This screenshot below is not correct in either stats or labelling, it is a recent mockup of what will appear (players of the first game might recognize these stat pips).

Meanwhile a +10 and a -10 button has been added to the stack slider to fine tune amounts of ammo or parts being handled.

A large swathe of new audio sounds have been implemented into the game for weapon fire, impact noises and prop destruction. This entire topic is deserving of its own article and footage because text doesn't do it justice, but we're pretty excited about how good they sound.

Lastly the biggest major change is an overhaul of how enemies act during combat, which we'll take a closer look at in the next segment.

Overhauling the enemy morale system

Here is a summary of the revisions to the morale system:

• Enemies now gain a small shooting delay when the player breaks contact, meaning no more instant turn-and-shoot from AI controlled units.

• The accuracy of enemy units is now directly tied to their morale level. Enemies will be much more accurate in the early access launch compared to the demo, but this will degrade rapidly when enemies come under fire from the player.

• Morale is now twinned to sound radius. If a unit can be aggroed by something, they can also take morale damage from it. Gunfire, nearby impacts, direct hits and units dying near allied enemy units can all damage a unit's morale.

• Damage to morale can trigger specific AI states such as panic, retreat, vehicle ejection or leaving the level altogether. How and when these states are triggered will vary across units and factions.

• Tangential to the morale system is the incognito system (wherein the player is not considered hostile by enemy units initially). This will not be available in the early access launch, as the system is being reworked and will return at a later date.

Let's take a closer look at some of these points.

Long-time readers might recall a brief mention about the existing morale system. In what you've played so far, this system was based around a system of thresholds that, when met, would cause the unit to flee. This old system has been removed and is being replaced with morale events.

[N.B. Vehicle pathing is also getting overhauled, but we aren't showing that off right now.]

How this works is units now have two new things that can be assigned to them: an AI profile and a morale profile. The AI profile dictates things like a unit's sight radius, whether it will hold its ground in a gun fight, how "aware" it is of the player's presence and how fast a unit can react.

Meanwhile the morale profile dictates what a unit may do if the player triggers a morale event. There are four distinct events that can happen to a unit, which are:

Some of the events can occur at the same time, such as panicking before fleeing or retreating, because there's a chance to roll on each one as you'll see in the next image. We are not going to explain every field of these profiles (that will instead go into documentation for modders at a later time), but to give you an idea of how complicated this gets, here is an example of a basic NOSPOL cop's AI profile.

And here is an example of a general morale profile any unit might have.

Each unit can have its own dedicated morale profile, but if we want to give it a specific morale profile in a particular level (for example, we don't want units to have the option of fleeing at all), we can override that in our map editor.

The morale profile also controls other values, such as weapon stability. Weapon stability, if you recall from another older post, affects the accuracy of a unit firing at the player. The lower the value, the worse the unit's accuracy is.

So how does all of this look in practice? In the screenshot below the player is aiming at a cop that is currently idle and unaware of the player. This cop has the default morale profile that was pictured above assigned to it. The unusual green text around the cop is a visual representation of systems that are normally invisible to the player.

We'll only pay attention to three things from this debug text, which is the morale itself (set at a value of 10), what state the cop is currently in (IDLE), and what the cop's stability is (currently -20). Next, the player starts shooting in the general direction of the cop…

Another debug visualization in the form of yellow circles has appeared in this image. These are bullet impacts, with the yellow circles symbolizing the radius of a bullet's effect on enemy morale. What this means is the player doesn't necessarily need to directly hit the enemy to have an effect on enemy morale.

Looking more closely at the cop, the morale value has dropped from 10 to about 9.2 as a result of the recent bullet impact. Due to the player's action, the cop's state has changed from IDLE to STATIONARY_SHOOT and the stability has increased from -20 to -18.04 because they are down on one knee and thus have slightly better aim.

The player continues to shoot several more times in the direction of the cop, leading to the following…

The cop's morale has dropped to just above 0 as a result of the bullet impacts. This has triggered the RETREAT morale event, meaning the cop is now moving towards a safer area while still shooting at the player. As a result of this movement, the cop's stability has decreased from -18.04 to -34.86 meaning its accuracy is worse. This cop will continue to move towards a point in the map that is considered safe from the player, or until a certain amount of time has passed.

Prior to this overhaul, enemy units tended to do just one of two things: frantically run away from the player immediately, or snowball the player with several of their nearby buddies. We can still make such things happen – the point is we now not only have control over that, but also how and for how long.

Further reading

If you'd like more words to read, Makeup and Vanity Set recently talked with The Phrasemaker about making the soundtrack for Brigador Killers, while Stellar Jockeys were interviewed at the start of the month by PC Gamer about Brigador Killers.

If not, then see you on August 20th.