Greed Corp

By EricMesa

February 13, 2011 - 2 minutes read - 411 words

This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy. At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up. This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect to getting more people to buy a digital good by putting it on sale even if they don’t have shelf space to clear. Part of what drew me to the game was the decidedly retro-futuristic art style. It gives the game a very unique set of visuals. The 1920-40s music (I’m not 100% sure which decade) also helps add to the atmosphere.

The game is a semi-anvilicious game about how societies have to make a decision between exploitation of natural resources and sustaining life. It is illustrated via the metaphor of having land tiles that lose height as they’re worked. When they get to the base level, if they are worked again, that tile collapses. This can be used defensively or offensively to create an island for your base. Although I’ve only played Risk once or twice, I’d say the game is Risk-like as well as tabletop gaming-like. The game is simplified so that the height of the tile does not provide any attack or defense bonuses. There’s one simple way to know if you’ll take a tile - you need to enter the tile with an army of size equal to or greater than the one you’re taking over. The number of units remaining on the tile is your attack force minus the defenders. And those guys cannot move until the next turn. So strategy quickly becomes important.

I have not yet played online, but playing against the computers has been very fun and I can’t wait to play against humans. I’ve just been trying to refine my strategies. The fact that the users have a max of 90 seconds to complete a turn means that most games don’t take more than 20 minutes, making for a much faster game than a lot of the other online multiplayer games out there.

I think that if you like what I described above, you should definitely snap up this game if it’s again available for $5. For $10 you probably want to watch the videos on Steam and see if maybe there’s a demo on Steam or at the game’s website. I certainly haven’t regretted my purchase.