Bollywood: Why Cruelty Squad's Steam Reviews Are So Positive

The craziness of Cruelty Squad has taken the hearts of indie fans on Steam. The game is currently sitting at an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam with over 2500 reviews. The high praise makes sense: Beneath the purposefully shocking and ugly graphics, there is a great game that showcases an interesting take on dystopian futures.

Cruelty Squad was released on June 16, 2021. The self-described tactical first person shooter puts players in the shoes of a faceless grunt who performs dirty jobs for whichever corporate overlord pays the most. The gameplay won't be topping many's best first person shooters lists, but playing the game itself is fun due to its deliberateness and challenging difficulty. Where Cruelty Squad shines (and gets most of its fanfare) is its subject matter and absurdity.

The vast majority of Steam reviews focus on the preposterous situations and characters contained within the experience. The main thread that seems to be popping up in reviews is the game's complete lack of coherence. Cruelty Squad purposefully ignores modern genre conventions. It revels in its ugly UI, cherishes its eye-numbingly grotesque art direction, and relishes its difficulty. Any of these things taken out of context might keep the game squarely out of the highest rated games of 2021 list on Steam, but together, these are Cruelty Squad's strengths. It assaults the senses to hammer home its main point: the future is scary, and not everything coming with it is pretty.

The level design of Cruelty Squad is a love letter to its open-ended assassination simulator predecessors Deus Ex and Hitman. Secrets are stuffed into every level that can augment the main character with new visually disturbing upgrades. Everything is busy and awful; whether it's by design or by accident is up to personal interpretation. Its gameplay loop is straight out of FPS history and purposefully challenging. The in-game stock market can crash in a matter of milliseconds, rendering all investments worthless.

The corporations are fine, though - they always end up on top. In this visually assaulting world, corporations control everything and will do anything to maintain that control. Reality is a nightmare controlled by suits in a far off building who don't care who lives or dies, only that their power goes unchecked. Cruelty Squad purposefully makes itself so uncomfortable to play, so awful to experience, so inherently challenging to the faculties, that it feels like living through a postmodern art piece that is actively trying to kill whoever looks at it.

If a world filled with corporate-sponsored assassinations and cyberpunk bio-augmentations ala Deus Ex doesn't sound like a good time, then avoid Cruelty Squad entirely. Consumer Softproducts seems to have known what it was doing, and the game feels like it's in on its own joke when it throws players into its corporate hellscape. The game's hideous coat of paint covers up the social commentary underneath, but dedicated players will likely have a great time uncovering it.

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August 02, 2021 at 12:20AM

Labels: ScreenRant - Feed