CORRUPTION 2029
No talking animals this time around
SWEDISH DEVELOPER The Bearded Ladies made a game a little while ago that was a mix of real-time stealth and turnbased tactics, in which you were heavily outnumbered by the enemy, and had to tune your approach to combat situations effectively. There was a duck in a top hat, a pig with a blunderbuss, and a sniper fox. You know the one.
With Corruption2029, just over a year later, the same devs have released the same game, but without talking animals.
It’s an unexpected and slightly bizarre release, which might perhaps make sense if it were framed as a prequel. In fact, you’re given very little information about what’s going on. The opening cinematics tell you more about your troops than the geopolitics, introducing them as drones stripped of their humanity. There’s a distinct whiff of Syndicate or XCOM in the way they stomp around in their long flappy coats, giving the occasional glimpse of a robotic leg, but their large angular helmets set them apart. You act as their controller, using them to explore the ruined streets of America during a new civil war in real time, activating some sort of stealth cloak when you want to remain unseen. Getting spotted brings the entire map’s worth of enemy soldiers down on your position, so it’s worth putting off until the last possible moment.
Engaging enemy soldiers drops the game into a turn-based XCOM mode, with high and low cover, overwatch, and to-hit percentages. Apart from at the very start, you are always outnumbered, so attacking from ambush and whittling down enemy numbers using distractions and silenced weapons are a must. Get a lone trooper far enough from his buddies, and you can open up with all weapons without being heard, but gauging that distance is a fine art. Add to this the pathetic weakness of silenced weapons, and it’s only the very basic enemy troops who go down easy.
Where it deviates more from the XCOM formula is in the lack of a strategic layer. You choose your missions and you play them, almost as if you were some sort of drone yourself. You pick up additional weapons and “implants,” such as the ability to jump really high, along the way, doling them out to your squad of three. Nicely, there’s no restriction on what weapon combos you can equip, so if you want two assault rifles, go for it. Ammunition is infinite, but magazines are small, leading to frequent reloading.
Corruption has a lot to like about it. The duck, pig, and fox brought personality to a world of decaying buildings and crashed planes, but the context of a war still being fought even though both sides have forgotten why means the XCOM mechanics make more sense. It helps that the game can be beautiful at times, with light slicing through autumnal trees and wonderful blue hexagonal domes popping up as you deploy an energy shield, although your viewpoint is maddeningly fixed in terms of height and angle.
A dev reusing so much of a previous game to make a new one may have been unexpected—the game has no official website, and even the developer’s site doesn’t mention it—but when it results in a fully refreshed title like this, sold for a budget price, it’s very much the kind of thing we can get behind.