Look, there wasn’t a way to cleverly title this review with a game name like this, it’s 139 characters long! That’s more than double the normal length for SEO to work in my favor. Will anyone even find this review? Who can say. All I know is that I had a blast with this game as it actively tried to blast my eyes and ears out every chance it got. BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is a standalone sequel to BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT, meaning you don’t need to have played the prior game, but you’ll be far better prepared for what’s to come if you did. BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is a first-person boomer shooter that emulates the Brazilian bootleg games of the 2000s with hideous precision you have to experience for yourself.
The story picks up moments after the third game ends. You assume the role of Da Silva, the savior of Brazil. In celebration you threw a party, but things went sideways again, this time thanks to Ronaldo McDalest (a Brazilian Ronald McDonald variant). Now you’ve got unfinished business to save Brazil once again, and are quickly thrust straight into the boomshoot action. Let’s back up a bit: If you go digging through the files of the third game, you’ll find the vertical slices of BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER that’s a Sonic-inspired game, and then a Wolfenstein-inspired game to be BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 2. If that doesn’t help set the tone for what’s to come, I don’t know what else will.
There are some new tricks you immediately have access to that give your character more verticality, resulting in (for better or worse) a lot of required first-person platforming. The game’s level design is (intentionally) not the best, so this isn’t as fun as it might seem, but Da Silva can now double-jump and dash. A stamina bar of three pips relates to your jumps and dashes, you can do two jumps and a dash, or three forward dashes. The stamina bar replenishes really fast so that you can keep up the momentum. This makes this more of a movement shooter, which is anachronistic to this Quake II-like. Even with that being the case, there’s lots of cool ways to access the game’s secret areas by using them.
Every weapon is essentially a re-skin of a Quake gun. You’ve got pistols, shotguns, machine guns, a grenade launcher, and of course a rocket launcher. There’s always a twist in its design that barely resembles what it’s a reskin of. You’ll even get upgrades that give you gold variants of dual-pistols or a double-barreled shotgun. I picked up a paper airplane folded from Brazilian currency that shoots lightning. This time around, not everything is a pure reskin as some weapons offer bizarre presentations where you won’t even know what they do until you pull the trigger. For instance, there’s a needler-type gun that works just like the one in Halo, and you can even wield chimarrão, a traditional herbal tea as a flamethrower.
Whether this game is a shitpost or just brainrot, call it what you will. BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is a manic game full of texture swaps that have no rhyme or reason for their placement, where the image is so crunchy, it looks like it’s been saved through a dozen types of compression after being faxed and copied. This actually coupled beautifully and horrifically with the deep-fried audio. The music bounces between pleasant and a cacophony of sound effects processed through a bass filter that’s set too high. It’s like being inside of a TikTok video, and it’s kind of great. All of the audiovisual presentation of this game is abrasive, from the volume inconsistency of wav files in those late 90s / early 00s mods to the undulating, wobbly textures on display.
[This Brazilian boomer shooter] is a manic game full of texture swaps that have no rhyme or reason for their placement, where the image is so crunchy, it looks like it’s been saved through a dozen types of compression after being faxed and copied.
Progressing through the game’s levels, you’ll traverse from Rio to São Paulo to Salvador. Most of the signage will be in Portuguese, some with English translations. Because the level design is outrageous, you’ll get arrows and signs to guide you, and at no point did I ever get lost. To circumvent having to design things properly, water is used to climb ladders – it’s effective, but bizarre. Progression throughout a level is usually gated by acquiring silver and gold keys. These can be found by killing certain types of enemies or solving a simple puzzle. All of the key doors are ghastly in their design, just a transparent texture with text on it that is almost never aligned on the plane it is placed when it does open. There’s tons of secrets, though this game does revisit a few jokes such as the casting couch. There are many references that, if I were Brazilian, I’m sure I’d find hilarious. There’s one level where you’re having to fight an onslaught of enemies for several minutes straight, but you are rewarded by the game’s only unique level with an homage to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as you move about the level with appropriately awkward controls. Predictably there’s even an E1M1 reference to round things out.
I only died a handful of times during the game, and of those times they were mostly platforming failures. Though there will be many times where you’re outnumbered, and you’ll have to dash and circle strafe to minimize damage. Enemies are incredibly varied, with brutes made of brick, two people on a dirt bike that shoot at you, and even the screaming suicidal bombers that you’d find in Serious Sam. Should you take damage from any of them, the game is extremely generous to find a health pick-up, which consists of pastel & sugarcane juice (a popular Brazilian snack and beverage). It’s all so incredibly charming to represent its culture.
Like BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3, this game uses the actual idTech 2 engine for everything it does. So the fact that you get a Tony Hawk level out of this engine makes the developer a mad genius for pulling off. I would do a part in this review where I show my PC specs, but this game ran at maximum framerate all the time. There are visual options that you can set, but this’ll run on anything as it’s an honest-to-goodness idTech 2 game. BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3 took me 2.2 hours to finish the campaign, across 29 levels, and individual levels could be completed in two to four minutes. Steam says that BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4 was 2.5 hours long, over 19 levels total, and time to complete levels took four to six minutes. For a $5 game, there’s no downside in picking this up to see what this is all about.
The game is so quirky with some of its finer and even overt details. The most obvious thing is the fact that the game sports a Grand Theft Auto III HUD because that’s what a bootleg game would have, right? Throughout every level, there will be a physical quicksave button you can press that will quicksave your game, just as if you pressed F6. It’s both hilarious and a reminder to just press F6 to quicksave as you work through the levels, but you could just use these buttons as quicksave checkpoints. True to the era, the game also supports manual saves too.
I can’t speak to bootleg culture of the country, but I definitely remember getting CD-ROMs packed with maps that were not always in English or even resembled the game I was playing. In that regard, developer Joeveno has accurately captured the lineage and heritage of the time. This is a game that’s unabashedly self-aware and feels like a fever dream you’re awake for. A lot of the jokes and references often went over my head, but this first-person boomshoot is absolutely unhinged, and I was captivated as I sat in disbelief. BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is a lot of things, but like the previous game, it’s a first-person shooter you can’t miss for how wildly absurd and wonderful it is.
