Conglomerate 451 download the new for apple

Magic spells become that vaguely explained techno-bio-wizardry that every cyberpunk future seems to have, with your soldiers able to zap and stun enemies with electrical attacks, hack into baddies’ brains to fiddle with their accuracy, and raise up magneto-shields in front of their allies. In fact, pretty much everything readily transposes itself from one setting to the other. It’s a lesser-spotted genre that’s more often found hanging out in medieval fantasy environments, your treasure strewn dungeons and skeleton-buggered crypts and the like, but the ninety-degree angles of the rain-slick alleys and steel suspended walkways of cyberpunk dystopia lend themselves just as readily to grid-based adventuring. The action unfolds in the manner of Dungeon Master and Legends of Grimrock, with your team of three expendable vat-grown clones afflicted with some miserable condition that prevents them moving diagonally or less than 15 feet at a time. It is a turn-based, grid-based, clone-based, squad-based strategy management game, in which you command a small crew of genetically engineered super soldiers in an attempt to destabilise and undermine an inclement neon city’s autocratic league of corrupt companies. That is both a frankly terrifying number of conglomerates to have to contend with, as well as antithetical to the tendency of conglomerates to, well, conglomerate. If I had a son and I wanted him to grow up bad, I would name him James Conglomerate and only let him watch business news.Ĭonglomerate 451 is a cyberpunk dungeon crawler set in a futuristic world containing, presumably, no fewer than 451 different conglomerates. Of all the words that I know, which is literally dozens, “conglomerate” is the one that seems the most up to no good. Whether it’s the militaristic association of the glottal “cong”, or the overcast bleakness of the central “glom”, from start to finish the whole deal exudes a menacing kind of energy. Even the word sounds sinister, like it might throw a burlap sack over your head and bungle you into the back of a blacked out minivan, then pop you in the temple with a silenced pistol and throw your corpse out in the street in front of your mother’s house.

This week, he's taking on the faceless organisations of Conglomerate 451.Ĭonglomerate. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.

Conglomerate 451 download the new for apple