[GAMING REVIEW] Corruption 2099: 25% to Hit or 75% to Miss?

As an ex-member of the XCOM Podcast, it's not uncommon for us to discuss – as we did in the last episode – turn-based tactical/strategic games which borrowed liberally from or trade on the "XCOM formula." While others are more passionate about the systems and lore of XCOM itself, I like to think of myself as more of a man of the world, with eclectic tastes which are unusually flexible. At any given time, my wish list has a number of games which fit the general mold but don't necessarily play the same game.

Corruption 2029 has been on that wish list for six months. From the same studio as Mutant Year Zero, Corruption promises that XCOM-like experience of commanding a group of powerful individual soldiers with cool gear against an implacable enemy, mixing stealth, moment to moment tactical decisions, and special powers against overwhelming odds.

That sounds amazing.

Doesn't it?

Graphico!

Well, there's no way around it -- is is pretty. Even on relatively modest video hardware (in my case, a 1070) the graphics are snappy, the lighting effects are surprisingly good, and the textures hold up at pretty much every resolution that you are likely to be looking at.

Are the graphics an unmitigated good?

What I'm saying is that they don't suck. In fact, they probably are better than most of the other near-XCOM games they compete with.

Phoenix Point, as much as I love it, doesn't have nearly the same kind of handcrafted attention to maps and environmental storytelling for obvious reasons; PP is procedurally generated and all of the content in C2029 is, as far as I can tell, made by a human being.

This will come back to being significantly important in a couple of sections.

In actual play, animations look quite good. Most of the time the characters flow from position to position without looking wooden 't or out of place, with the sole exception that immediately jumps to mind of climbing ladders. It would be unfair to pick on this game for bad ladder climbing transitions given that I can't think of anyone else who does a good job of it, but so it goes.

The high point is, again, the lighting and that the designers definitely chose to put point and area light sources into every map to demonstrate how much love they have for ray casting. To their credit, it paid off.

Plotting to Burn

Here's the pitch from the creators of C2029 on the Epic Store:

Set in a dystopian America in the not-so distant future. CORRUPTION is a new tactical strategy game from The Bearded Ladies, creators of ‘Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden’.

That is literally the entirety of the setting pitch that they want you to be fascinated by, and the sparseness of the importance of the story set up and the plot even comes through in the trailer video which they released.

Let me give you a slightly longer version:

The US is fallen into civil war between two factions which you probably don't care about because they aren't particularly well fleshed out in terms of things that they want that affect you. In fact, you start as a heavily borged up soldier freshly rebooted from the wreckage of a crashed transport (and haven't we seen this before), with the first thing you need to do being go find the remaining, surviving members of your squad and get to the front lines.

Along the way we learn that you don't actually have free will in combat, you and your compatriots are controlled by an external intelligence – which I suppose is a perfectly reasonable in-setting excuse to explain the player, but it seems like something just a step too far when I already had very little reason to care about these characters aside from the way that they execute my commands.

There definitely seems to be a subtext which is implicit about the issue of humanity, the question of subsuming your will to another, how that actually differs from war in general – but it is the most brief, disinterested not in the direction of an actual plot and doesn't actually set up for much later.

What there is of the plot gets communicated to you via mission updates, mission briefings, and the occasional environmental item which you will probably discover as a result of trying to skirt around ridiculously placed enemy groups. Those finds are sometimes pieces of documents, notes, all reasonable things to find lying around. They are also very brief.

World building is not a strong point here.

The Play's the Thing

"But Lex," you might say, "this is a tactical combat came from a studio known for doing another tactical combat game! Surely expecting it to be something else is unreasonable!"

Maybe you're right. Or maybe you would be right if this was actually a tactical combat game.

Oh, it pretends to be a tactical combat game. It has all of the trappings of a tactical combat game. It has a pretty nice tactical combat engine with turn-based action, a fair amount of stealth, and the by-now ridiculously overused high and low cover icons which you will recognize immediately. It has percentages to hit (most of which make Rookies in XCOM seem overqualified for this military organization). It has damage meters and expected damage results (which suggest that you should be carrying slingshots with some nice metal balls rather than depending on the military contractors in this setting). A number of the interface affordances are quite nice, and it all looks good in the game engine.

But it's not a tactical game in the sense of "a game which provides you a situation which you must analyze tactically, deploy your forces, bring them to bear in a militarily sensible way, and accomplish your goals."

It's not like that at all.

Instead, it is a puzzle game which makes use of the trappings of the XCOM-like tactical genre to try and pretend to be one.

In practice, it's a lot more like Commandos, but with characters which are far more constrained, player choices which are nowhere near as broad, missions which can only be approached one way, and the clear indication that the developers really only expect you to play the game, every mission, via one specific mechanism – and everything else is wrong.

You can't flirt your way by the guard at the front by using your doxy then sneak in behind while he's distracted and slipped the next guard's throat with a knife. No, we can't do that. Maybe you can use your mechanically augmented super legs to jump up behind a guard inconveniently on the top of an otherwise inaccessible platform, and maybe you can actually get a stealth kill off on him before the guy on the next platform sees you – but even as the game unfolds your choices are not particularly vast.

Part of that is the mechanical choice that the developers made in how egregiously overpowered the enemy forces are compared to you at almost every turn. Unless you focus on stealth multi-kills (and sometimes even if you do depending on how bad a die roll comes up), every single enemy on the map is going to get alerted, run straight toward you, and probably have every advantage as they close. While you can't evade them, and if you do so long enough they go back to merely an alerted status, your odds are long it best.

This leads to a gameplay loop where you repeatedly bang into a mission, pick a means of engagement, drop a save file, and then try something – with the odds very much stacked toward "and then reload the save file."

That would be okay if the problem felt like it was in my play. There are games that successfully wrestle with being Nintendo hard and are still a joy. In the case of C2029, the sensation is more like that of playing with a cheating, unfair GM, who will break out target modifiers that you've never seen before just to screw you over, give his characters magic prescience, and generally just has it out for you to the point where you never know if you've made a bad decision or you're just not reading the GM's mind.

It's extremely frustrating, is what I'm saying.

I am sure that there is a small, dedicated group which absolutely loves throwing themselves at this game over and over until they figure out the One True Way that the developers intended for them to succeed or they get the luckiest break of dice rolls – or save scum until they do.

That might be for you. It's definitely not for me.

Final Hour

What's the verdict, then? I suppose this will come as a shock.

I don't suggest you buy it. Not unless it's on sale for less than you would normally throw away on a candy bar or some other piece of short-term, disposable entertainment.

Sure, there is the chance that you will really enjoy it and it will speak directly to what you enjoy in life. Maybe what you want is an extremely puzzle-centric tactical game without much in the way of a story which doesn't even try. Maybe that's what you want.

I would bet that it's probably not.

The graphics are borderline great. The gameplay UX is a little bit clunky but I've certainly played worse.

It's the game itself as a game which is both frustrating because the game design is intentionally frustrating and because it really had the potential to be so much more.

You know how you sometimes find a game which you are excited about when it was announced, time goes by, and you pick it up later with the hope that others came before you, hope to knock off the rough edges, and it's finally good to play? Then you play it and you realize the original conception just wasn't good?

This is that game.

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Rating: -2 (on the Fudge scale, -4 - +4)

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Where can you get it?

Corruption 2029 is only available through the Epic Game Store. for $19.99 USD at the time of posting.