Cruelty Squad Review

 

Embracing Uniqueness-A Cruelty Squad Review

Cruelty Squad, for better or for worse, is by far the most insane and unique fps game I’ve played in my entire life. This immersive sim takes you through one of the most insane universes ever conceived in a sort of anarcho-capitalist nightmare fueled by flesh and guts.

Deathly Loop

In Cruelty Squad death is merely a setback, as technology has gotten to a point where full body reconstruction is a commodity. As a societally deemed failure and loser, the player is hired by an ominous megacorporation to be a deranged hitman. Each mission will have you hunt down a variety of different targets in vast, multi-leveled areas (all of which can be replayed infinitely due to the aforementioned body reconstruction, that NPCs often joke about). It is these multi-layered levels that had me coming back again and again to Cruelty Squad to optimize routes to beat them as fast as possible. 

And I mean you can go unbelievably fast. Check out dudeguy’s world record speedrun in which he beats all the main levels in 4 and a half minutes in game time (To understand the heft of that the average playthrough of this game is around 10-20 hours).

In a general sense, the gunplay and level design of Cruelty Squad is top notch, a feature many may not notice at first looking at the downright garish visuals. To be fair, the crazy visuals and mechanics nearly completely conceal what is, at its core, a rock solid tactical shooter-like a diamond covered in 6 feet of dirt. 

A Brash Learning Curve

However, the enjoyment I got out of Cruelty Squad came after a long and arduous journey of understanding its completely unexplained mechanics. Yes, I know one of the points on the game's Steam page is “No hand holding!” but there are things here that stand to actively dull the experience (a point that, sadly, seems like what the developers were going for). Without a guide, there’s no doubt any aspiring player of Cruelty Squad will hit a wall trying to fully understand how to play it, so let’s go over a few of those problems here:

• Divine Light and difficulty mechanics-Cruelty Squad comes with built in borders around the game screen, and, unlike what someone would initially think, they have massive impacts on gameplay. Depending on your border you’ll encounter special enemies, be able to open doors to progress to secret levels or weapons, take more or less damage, and change how much it costs to retry a level. Another point of note, getting the most important border Divine Light, which increases difficulty and allows to open the mentioned doors for secrets, goes away if you die ONCE. This means you have to go and get it back by touching a special orb located in two levels-one of which requires a lengthy trek and various upgrades while the other is in the last non secret level of the game. This results in the player going back and forth to regain the border every time they die trying to get a secret.

• Balance-In a sense, every single rifle and SMG are around the same in lethality. Headshots are always a one shot kill on non armored enemies, which I love. However, once you get the rocket launcher you essentially will keep it in one of your two weapon slots the whole game. Due to how the armored enemies scoff at any other weapon and their frequency in the later levels I found myself relying on the Launcher in half the game. In addition to weapons, most of the unlockable equipment you get is almost completely useless. The grapple hook upgrade changed the game completely, allowing you so many options in traversal that it makes every other arm augmentation a downgrade. This lack of balance alongside a slew of joke upgrades and meme weapons leads to a bit of frustration for new players. 

• Strange Control mapping-A minor nitpick, but what players will immediately recognize is how strange the bindings are for Cruelty Squad. I wouldn’t complain about it if it didn’t play 10x better the second I rebinded everything to a more typical fps scheme. I’m sure people got used to the bindings over time, but what I’m saying here is that you wouldn’t have to get used to them if the game just controlled normally from the start. 

And yet, despite all of this, I’d still call this game a masterpiece.

The style and writing are excellent, and Cruelty Squad just continues to embrace every trope it throws in the trash can. It could care less about telling the player what to do or accessibility options. In a time where games are far too formulaic, Cruelty Squad is just UNIQUE (hell, I might refrain from using the word in reviews again due to Cruelty Squad). There has been absolutely nothing like this, created in absolute opposition to everything in the world and all its norms. Death means nothing, money is just a number, and textures resemble barf more than anything real. 

My favorite example of this is about halfway through the main set of missions, where the police invade your apartment to kill you and you fight your way out to escape. For many games, this just seems like the end, a final standoff where you take out who you need to survive. And yet, it gets revealed to you that the target the police were actually after had a social security number 1 off from you and the investigator fat fingered his keyboard. You just keep working for your company like nothing happened, it’s insane. 

Around every corner of Cruelty Squad is something so outlandish I’d be disappointed in myself for spoiling it for all of you. Through the struggle and frustration is genuine hilarity and interesting gameplay. You work for every bit of the crazy situations, but in a sense that makes it so much sweeter. Every time I made it past a point that left me stuck it was a genuine accomplishment, but the game doesn’t ever dwell on it. Cruelty Squad will throw level concept after level concept after level concept until its wondrous finale (a grand finale that comes after two other endings).  

At first I struggled to really recommend such a game to others, but as it went on Cruelty Squad just kept growing on me. Once you read a few guides to understand the mechanics at hand, and really focus in, there is a depraved yet genuine piece of art in here. In a twisted and gruesome way, Cruelty Squad echoes the voices of the generation it was made from and their feelings about the world around them.

Or maybe its some dumb pseudo-shitpost that exists to fuck with people, I’ll let you decide. 

Literally every piece of dialog is crazy

Verdict

As for a verdict, I find this game extremely hard to score, so I’d say just give it a try and give some genuine effort to see the legendary game that's within Consumer Softproducts’ Cruelty Squad. It may not be for everyone, but it's a champion achievement for aspiring developers everywhere to be confident in their vision.

*all images except for the screenshot used last were from the games steam page*