Yeah, no. This is not a good game. The visual aesthetic is amazing, and the concept is cool, but the mechanics are pretty trashy. Extremely weak and flighty guns that have no weight behind them, combined with generally simple level design and unintuitive controls.

I love me some weird, dystopic, and artsy-fartsy games. But the game actually needs to be good for me to commit. This game is all substance; it's all meat and no veg. It's gleeful in how post-modern it is with its presentation, but the actual game under the hood is just drab.

This is awesome as an art project. It's lame as a game. This is insanely overrated. It's not offensively bad, but it's certainly not a fun experience unless you already have a long, cylindrical object up your butt.

Only played the first two levels. It's not what I expected; tactical and precise. Pizza-and-puke-core, that Cartoon Network stank that the internet likes. The economics are abrasive. Scrounging a tiny profit and losing it to a nonsense stock market.

The other reviews are funny, unbothered. Honestly being in debt IRL makes this a little less entertaining. To roil in that pain and express the grossness of it all. I get it on a level I don't want to, like other art. Probably won't be picking it up again.

Man, I don't fucking know. I like weird games, I like tactical shooters, I like immersive sims, but I don't like this. I gave it a good 2 hours and 5 levels until I threw in the towel, which I feel is fair all things considered.

The visual style is definitely doing... something. But whatever it is I don't find to be particularly clever or enjoyable. That music too... wack. Also for something billed as an immersive sim it sure feels pretty restrictive in how you tackle objectives. You die so quickly and with no checkpoints that's pretty hostile towards any sort of experimentation. I also feel like this game's humor is kinda lost on me, which may be a result of coming to this thing 3 years late but like... ok the jokes are that the NPCs say nonsense and that there's a stock market for wacky things like fish and livers. wooooooow

I'm angry at this game because I should love it but I don't and it's pissing me off. Maybe I'll return to this some day, but for now I feel like I'm being left out of the cool kids club on this one.

*Note I haven't done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING yet but I've done most of the secret levels save for House and Trauma Loop and thats just because they require a fuckton of grinding for money and idk when if I'll ever get it done.

Yeah this game is really fuckin good and I wish I wasn't such a jackass about it years ago.

When a game looks like cruelty squad you're essentially fighting an uphill battle with me, and it didn't help this came out next to a lot of other low effort cashgrab "retro indie boomer shooters!!!" that would fill the weaker sections of Realms Deep streams didn't help one bit. From what I saw this game was just a giant ironic shitpost somehow masquerading as some stupid fake deep "we live in a society" bullshit.

Not the case at all.

Cruelty Squad is unconventional. Very unconventional. But it rides the line so thin that almost everything is still readable, and the gameplay behind all that is addicting as shit.

The game is objectively ugly on purpose. But everything on the hud is still readable and you can easily understand what's going on. Yes, I'll admit some of the bright colors did get to me and gave me a headache after a bit at points but again it surprisingly didn't bug me as much over time.

If I were to describe this game, it would be "first person hitman with deus ex powers for schizos". You have targets on your hud, and you're tasked with killing them. How? Doesn't matter, just get it done. With a few exceptions Cruelty Squad's levels are exactly what make imsims so special, and the powers and weapons you obtain are just the cherry on top. It's funny, this game has a lot of stealth elements, but at the same time I wouldn't even totally call it a stealth game with how many points you'll probably just end up gunning people down. But you gotta go a certain way about it. You can't just play this like a doom game, you gotta be precise, take cover when it matters, go for headshots. It's incredibly satisfying and the short completion times for each levels help encourage replayability all the more.

My only real complaints if anything is that noticing enemies can be a bit hard I feel sometimes? At least in crowded areas where so many people look the same so that got annoying sometimes. The last level also felt really obtuse and bad for the sake of it. That was entirely the point I'm sure but it just felt like a slog to get through.

Finally not sure if it's like this for anyone else but this game has some weird performance degradion over time for me, at least on my system (GTX 3060). Like, when I'll boot the game up, everything is a rock solid 60+ like it should be, but usually after like 9 level loads/retries the framerate dips into the 40s and I don't know why. I THINK its because the game is still trying to process stats of NPCs after their death on top of things like the stock markets? But I don't know, maybe this is just a me issue or something.

Other then that this has to be one of the most fun indie fpses I've played this year and I'm really upset at myself I didn't try it sooner. If you're still turned off because of the visuals or fans like I was, at least give it a try with an open mind. In terms of raw gameplay, this is a must-play for imsim fans as far as I'm concerned.

Cruelty Squad offers a unique and engaging experience for players who enjoy collecting Chunkopops. While the $11 price tag may initially seem steep, the game's community and the connections you can make with fellow Chunkopop enthusiasts make it a worthwhile investment. The game's world and characters are rich and diverse, providing a memorable experience that you won't find elsewhere. Whether you're a seasoned collector or just starting out, Cruelty Squad offers something special for all Chunkopop enthusiasts.

Score: 9/10

This is as much of an immersive sim as it is a fishing simulator. You are given a lot of tools to tackle on every mission, but that supposed variety to beat each assignment doesn’t really mean much in that the gun you use and the augmentations you equip only change the path you take, whether it be peacefully or violently, assault or stealth. You are given a fishing rod to, well, fish, but it doesn’t take any more effort other than clicking at the right time when a fish shows up. The point here is that Cruelty Squad isn’t really an immersive sim in that every action I make doesn’t affect the world beyond what happens to me during the mission I’m playing, and since you can get killed in a matter of seconds if you're not careful enough, so there's barely any room for errors. In any other case, this would be a failure, but here it may seem intentional, as life in this world seems to be static and cyclical. There was this one target in Darkworld I think that said something along the lines of: “I was here last time you came and I will be here the next time”. Thing is, nobody really dies in Cruelty Squad. You can get killed as much as you want, but your body will be reconstructed again, and it seems that it is the same for the targets. Everyone is doomed to relieve the same fate over and over, to kill or be killed. As long as it is profitable.

The world is utterly disgusting, the art style is nonsensical for the most part, humans are creepy looking and dogs are mutated beyond belief, and interiors are big yet full of nothing and with a hostile, sometimes maze-like, architecture. Every aspect here works in service of generating the biggest repulsion it can to the player. There's this one moment in the game, in Miner's Miracle, where the camera will switch to the first-person point of view of another person aiming at you with a sniper rifle. They never shoot at you, they're just aiming, like a constant threat. Everyone in this game seems to be in a constant state of paranoia. In Paradise, a seemingly normal neighborhood, most houses (if not every single one) have armed security that will shoot at you even if you're not trying to break in. NPCs talk about how they hate this world to its core and how their fellow coworkers are not trustworthy, and they even ask you to kill them. In the House level, there's an NPC - NPC which, for some reason, has its own name and can be killed forever, probably has something to do with being from the countryside - that not-so-subtly threatens you for being there, and every other NPC in this level will do the same if they’re not shooting at you. Most NPCs will tell you how much they hate their lives, the world and their particular situations, and the ones that try to do something good for the world are the ones you are sent to dispose of. People do not look friendly, even in the Headquarters, when they tell you that they're here for you, you can feel they're not trusty. There's something in their face, in the way they smile… it feels fake.

Everything has this feeling of being fabricated, that everything has lost its meaning. You get killed and your body gets reconstructed to try again. Rinse and repeat. You buy a house in the peaceful countryside to find out it's a murderous energy fueled hellscape that will let nothing in from the outside. People at the disco talk about wanting to game-end themselves. The player character casually watches a mass-shooting in the street during the intro like it's the sort of thing he watches every day. Some augmentations are either not that helpful or their description and effects are so vague you might think they don't even work. The value of a human body is determined by what the market dictates and a human heart can lose all its value in a matter of seconds. Cruelty Squad would be a really simple and not that impressive exercise on nihilism, but the thing that makes it stand out for me is that there seems to be a human heart at the core of it. During the intro you're told the player character has depression, the third ending has this text that starts talking about childhood, broken dreams and hopes being turned into ashes to become just another pawn in the corporate game, and the MC wears a shirt during the whole game that says LIFE. There's all this iconography in reference to LIFE and DEATH, there's a human being who is suffering, who wants all of this to end, who wants to be human once again. This might as well be a modern retelling of RoboCop with a hundred layers more of deranged nihilism. In all of its surrealism, there seems to be a component of reality, the constant agony for the rotten state of the uncaring world and the little value human life holds is very real. There's raw and fictionalized reality all over Cruelty Squad. Despite how unreal everything is, this could perfectly be the world we currently live in.

Cruelty Squad is something else to say the least. You may look at this game and think it was made by someone who abuses drugs for a living, and that's what the developer was going for. This game can get difficult at times and forces you to use strategy to get through certain levels, which can include stealth in certain moments. This game does take some inspiration by Cyperpunk, as you can get implants into your limbs that can make your playthrough easier and more fun to explore. There are plenty of weapons to unlock, implants to use, levels to play, and fish to catch as well. Don't let the visuals fool you, as this game is a lot more fun than it looks like.

not really a tactical stealth game, or an immersive sim, but some unknown third thing. sadly did not click with me as much as I'd hoped, trying to give it some more of my time with the hard difficulty and end game stuff but unfortunately the squishiness of your character makes it really hard to mess around with this game. I hate that the main way of getting upgrades is a completely random stock mechanic, I get how it links to the games themes, and it links to them very well, but god I just don't have the time or wherewithal for it! There's a lot I like in this game writing and presentation, it's a very smart very sharp game, but god I can barely engage with 90% of the gameplay. having to walk on eggshells cuz of the speed at which your character can be turned into paste just does not make for a fun gameplay experience. Bleh, wish I liked it more.

haha pyrocynical ga- A point in the horizon, a melting scene from your childhood. Your mortality is showing. A frantic drift towards nothing, biology doomed to an infinite recursive loop. Teeth with teeth with teeth. Take a bite. Serene scent of a coastal town, warmth of the sun. Bitter tears. Lust for power. This is where you abandoned your dreams. You are a high net worth individual, an expanding vortex of pathetic trauma. Finally a beautiful fucking nerve ape. A pure soul is born, its neurotransactions stutter into being. 30583750937509353 operations per nanosecond. Beauty eludes your porous mind.