This review contains spoilers
This is more of a mixed review, as I feel that the game doesn't really reach its full potential with the experience it delivers. I'll try to focus on what the game is, rather than what it isn't, but it's hard for me not to feel frustrated with how unrewarding the game ended up feeling compared to what I feel it could have been. Let's break the experience down to its elements, starting from the elephant in the room:
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)