Developer: Vanguard Games
Publisher: Vanguard Entertainment Games
Rrp: £6.99 (Steam)
Released: 10th December 2010
Available on: Steam
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
The world is ending. Not because of the sun exploding or aliens attacking. No, we did it, in our never ending quest for wealth we never once thought of the ramifications of our actions. And now the very ground becomes less stable with each thud of the harvesters. But if we don’t harvest our enemies will, we have no choice.
Greed Corp is a turn based strategy game in which you get to control one of four factions vying for control over the limited resources left. In other words, in order to win you have to be the last one standing. There are four single player campaigns to play through, each telling the story of one faction. These campaigns become progressively more difficult as the AI becomes more aggressive and the turn time limit becomes shorter.
This game is unusual for a strategy game is that regardless of which faction you choose they all create the same unit type. These units are known as walkers and can be created at a barracks fairly cheaply.
On its surface the combat seems to be a fairly simple affair, with whomever has the larger unit size winning and when it comes to the basic combat that is true, however the actual tactics behind the game run deeper.
Walkers can only move/attack once per turn as movement and attacking are one and the same. If you move to a tile that is occupied by enemy walker that is considered an attack. The good thing is that you can move your walkers to any other tile within your territory, as long as no gaps or other territories that block it, allowing reinforcements to be pulled in from a long distance.
As was mentioned before, the tactics of this game are more complex than the combat would make you believe. Sure, that tile in front only has twelve enemy walkers on it, you can easily defeat that with your sixteen units. But the next tile has six more walkers and they would just win back any land they lose.
You can also create cannons that can fire a great distance allowing you to take out five enemy walkers per shot, as well as lower the tile they’re on by one level. Unfortunately the cannons take a full turn to reload and another to shoot plus the shells are quite costly to buy.
Now I’ve mentioned in passing the cost of things but so far I’ve not mentioned how you actually accrue the resources required. Like everything in this game the answer is very simple, the only resource you need are coins and those coins come to you in two ways. The first and easiest is by simply ending your turn which nets you ten coins. The second way is by placing harvesters that will give you two coins for every tile adjoining that tile. Problem is a harvester gains these coins by mining the aforementioned tiles.
Each time a tile is mined it goes down a ‘level’. A tile can have a maximum of six levels and once a tile is below its last level it breaks apart causing anything
that happens to be on these tiles to be lost.
To make matters worse, there is no way to repair a tile or bring one back. This means even the act of gathering resources is something you have to give a careful amount of consideration to. Mine too much and you may have a lot of money but no way to combat against your opponents. Mine too little and you’ll have too small a army to really defend yourself.
Harvesters can also be used aggressively by causing them to overload. This makes the harvester self destruct taking out to the entire tile its on and any one level tiles nearby.
As you can see there is a great amount of thought to be put into every action. You can’t just mine willy-nilly nor can you take the offensive too greatly, both will end up badly. But being defensive won’t help either, this is all about balance, finding the right moment and location in which to strike.
So is this a game I could honestly recommend? Yes. It is, but only if the person really like strategy games and is willing to play something more… basic, in many ways. For £6.99 its a pretty reasonable game and it has online multiplayer so you needn’t only play against the AI.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Skulls of the Shogun
Endless Legend
Worms Reloaded
