Cruelty Squad

2025-04-05
Perfect Dark for meth users.

Above anything else Cruelty Squad wants you to know it's Weird, Man. You start it up and there's some edgy, corpo-militaristic guy telling you you suck while the camera goes all David Lynch over its fluorescent colors and low-poly geometry. And then you're in a menu that's whatever the opposite of Persona 5's menu's are, all organic and lo-fi with a sickening color palette that produces a headache as much from its ugliness as from how hard it is to parse. You hit the big "Start" button nested in the entrail-like buttons and are thrust into a "tutorial". A "tutorial" that taught me the basic controls and that I can shoot anyone and everyone but not how to actually play the game--where I actually had to google how the hell to start the real game (you need to leave and then figure out how to select another level from the main menu.... o k).

Its in this deep desire to be weird and interesting that I feel Cruelty Squad trips itself up. It invests time in cool ideas like body augments --that range from jumping higher to having your arms generate ammo so you never run out but must wait for the bullets to extrude out of you like so much deadly excrement-- and a stock market for corporations and human organs that change based on what you do in the game. But then explains none of these things well at all, meaning I didn't even realize I could buy said-augments till I was already halfway through the game. It delighted me with the variety in its levels, truly reminding me of Perfect Dark in that regard (on top of the huge array of weapons), but then has piss poor performance such that I had to lower the draw distance on the boat level so my expensive graphics card could handle it. I never talk about performance, man. How is a game with this little graphical oomph making me talk about performance?

But despite all its seemingly performative bits of friction shoved in your face like so many shards of glass, it is fun. The balls-hard difficulty means it turns into a game of leveraging your weird augments and weapons to cheese the AI that's seemingly built to be tricked. Why yes, faceless soldiers, I will shoot a gun and then run around the corner to lure your milling bodies into my killbox. So even while the weird, zany schtick might have wore off on me by the end, I was still having fun unlocking new guns and headshotting weird-ladies-with-knives-who-explode-into-poison-gas right up until the end where you ascend to Gorbino's Quest / Heaven (I didn't understand the story).