Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed” and true enough, this sums up the underlying sprit of Greed Corp. Developed by W!Games and released on Xbox Live pending completion of a PC, the game delivers satisfying, if not tricky turn-based strategy. Revolving around the finite resources available to the player, it will definitely serve as a challenge. However, this will more often than not serve as frustration than innovative gameplay and eventually serves as one of the few factors that forces Greed Corp to falter. Taking place in a world where harvestable resources are all but drained, players are given control of one of three factions seeking to not only fill their coffers with precious materials, simply survive at the end of a round. While executed in the time-tested grid map pattern, the simplicity will slowly fall away along with the ground under your harvesters. Tasked with establishing harvesters to garner resources each turn, the height of certain terrain pieces within the grid becomes extremely important. As your harvesters work, they increasingly reduce the overall integrity of the terrain upon which they’re situated as well as all surrounding grid pieces in immediate contact.
So, while you pocket a bit more money during the turns the harvester runs, it certainly won’t last forever. The ground will eventually become cracked and destabilized indicating that the terrain will exist for one final turn before falling away into the abysmal clouds below, taking your harvester and whatever is on the grid piece with it. Walkers, armories, and cannons will certainly grant you more than enough to spend your hard-harvested money on, but these always come at a danger as well. Walkers, constructed at armories, allow you to expand your territory by stalking across the grid landscape, seizing control of enemy harvesters and lands alike. However, should they find themselves trapped on a piece of critically damaged land, a cannon could easily cause a mishap that would see those walkers and the armories producing them destroyed. More often than not, situations will occur where multiple islands of landmasses exist, trading cannon fire and walkers sitting and waiting for the next action. This is where the transports come in. Easily the most costly of units, they allow you to move up to 16 walkers from one grid piece to any other piece on the play area. Unfortunately, should you forget to use the bumper buttons and send all 16 walkers, your invasion may fizzle before it even gets rolling and you’ll be without the resources to recover – being forced to self-destruct and restart the level. Sadly, this is just one of many complaints.
Each turn is timed, which wouldn’t be such a large issue if the controls were a bit less clunky. There were times where the wrong buildings were produced on the wrong terrain pieces. Again, this couldn’t possibly be as huge an issue if the game had any sort of ability to restart a level or utilize a checkpoint system. I understand this would be completely impossible in a multiplayer game, but the single player levels at time bordered on unforgiving, even taking into account how much the difficulty curve ramped up on the second level of the game. Proceeding forward, it progressively grew worse, if not more frustrating and I discovered that there was no possible way to change the difficulty setting – Believe me, I looked. Overall, it just became, at times, a matter of trial and error as I made my way across maps, building harvesters, moving walkers and hoping for the best against the computer controlled opponents only to have any hope of victory dashed in the last turn of the game. I wish I could say this was at the hands of clever AI opposition, but it was actually due to my getting stuck and having to self-destruct just for a chance to try it all over again.
As much as I was looking forward to Greed Corp, I ended up finding my hands clutching the controller in anger more than anything as I struggled to understand how exactly the game would perpetuate some of the gameplay mechanics it was subjecting me to. Granted, I did find myself enjoying the title at times upon discovering a game winning strategy that would allow me to barrel my way through to the end of a level. But this was usually soured and unsatisfying as I had already spent roughly two hours getting to that strategy. While the game didn’t disappoint as a strategy game, it came off as more of a puzzle doppelganger, forcing me to find the one solution that would work as opposed to working around various strategies. In the end, I found a lot about Greed Corp that I enjoyed, but not enough to immediately recommend it to anyone but the most die-hard strategy players and those are the one’s usually playing RTS games on their PCs anyway. So, if you are looking for a genuine challenge that might make you pull your hair out or grip that controller a lot harder than you usually do, sure, Greed Corp is for you. But if that isn’t the case, I have a feeling that controller will end up going through the TV screen a lot quicker than if you had just played some Modern Warfare 2 instead.
