From: Pedestrian Entertainment Inc.
A sidescroller? Sorta; Steam Brigade's ultimate heritage is in games like Rescue Raiders. You and your opponent have bases at opposite sides of an area; you build units at your base, they move horizontally across the screen (which you have to scroll to see the full play area), and the ultimate objective is to take out the enemy base.
Old school gameplay, in other words but, well, very nicely implemented. Steam Brigade's graphics are amazingly pretty for an indie game, boasting a somewhat goofy steampunk aesthetic. While your base churns out a variety of different types of units, you personally control a dirigible, floating over the battlefield--and while you don't have any weapons yourself, your blimp can lower a huge electromagnet to pick up your units and move them more quickly to key battlefield locations. Moreover, it uses a physics engine to get the feeling of objection motions and responses exactly right... something no old school game could computationally afford to do.
From the Developer
Ryan Thom says "Well, we were looking to do something fun with a lot of strategy and depth, but not a lot of conceptual complexity. We took a look at Rescue Raiders (which wikipedia credits as one of the first real-time strategy games) and saw that the side-scrolling perspective provided just that.