Greed Corp. is the first game set in the world of Mistbound. A steamy, Victorian world of floating rocks, where the planet has been devastated by mining efforts, and four corporations compete for the few remaining resources, continuing the demolition of the world in the process. Players run through a series of single-player campaigns which get progressively more difficult, or play against friends either locally or over Xbox Live.
Pursuit
The core gameplay is very much like a strategy board game. In fact, the rules and pieces are simplistic enough that it could be published as a board game without being overly complicated. The board is a hex grid of land, each with a destruction value from 1 to 6. In their territory, players can build Harvesters, Factories, and Cannons. Harvesters smash the land, increasing the destruction level of the tile it’s on, and each tile around it, generating money with each crunch. The factories build Walkers and Carriers. The Walkers are the primary Military unit, and the Carriers help them cross the inevitable gaps in the land. Cannons can be very slowly loaded with missiles, and fired at the enemy—killing Walkers and increasing destruction values. When a destruction value reaches six, that tile is destroyed and removed from the board. Players expand territory by moving Walkers into unclaimed or enemy land. When Walkers attack other Walkers, they always destroy each other one for one. Last one alive wins. Those are really all the rules one needs to get into this game. It’s so simple, I covered it in one paragraph. If I had given you all the unit costs, and a few other numbers, you could almost already play the game on a sheet of hex paper.
Each map presents a balanced start.
These rules are inherently balanced, and luck never becomes a factor in winning or losing. Winning a match means that you out-strategized your opponent, pure and simple. This may be the best part of this game. It’s very rare to come across any game in which nothing is randomized, and in which risk-management is not a major mechanic.
There was just one part of the rules which were unexplained, and which I could not figure out: the range of the missiles. Sometimes it seemed like they could fire across the whole map. Sometimes it seemed like they could only go a few spaces, and I couldn’t figure out why. The included manuals and tutorials were no help with this.
Each turn is timed. One has only 1 minute to make the decisions each turn. This is fine in one player, where one has gone through the tutorial, understands the rules, and isn’t planning on socializing. It even makes sense in ranked online games, since otherwise people would have to wait for some time while others potentially disappeared to get snacks or something, but in a local multi-player game, it just doesn’t make any sense. When playing locally, the timer is the biggest complaint. Not only does it mean that there is no time for me to explain the rules to someone playing for the first time, but it means that all players must keep their attention to the game at all times, or risk running the time down and losing their turn. This causes the social aspect, usually present in other board games, to suffer. An option to turn the timer off in local matches would have been really great.
Carriers become very important in the late-game.
There are lots of maps available for multi-player games, but you have to play the single-player campaign to get at all of them. I know a lot of games do this, but I still don’t like it. Fully three-quarters of the multi-player experience is locked until one plays single player. All this does is frustrate people who buy the game specifically to play with their friends. I long for the day when game developers all learn to stop doing this.
The single-player campagn crosses the world of Mistbound.
I was unable to find any one to play with online. I tried on several different days of the week, and at all different times. There were never any open games to join.
Panorama
The graphics are clear and crisp. The player is never confused as to what is going on. It’s especially nice that each of the factions has a completely different graphics set, rather than just a different color scheme. That makes it very easy to determine what’s going on at a glance.
Gimmicks
The cool thing is the way destroyed tiles are handled. Since each playing field is a floating island, the destroyed tiles crumble and fall away into the mists below, taking any buildings or units with them when they fall. This process is graphically interesting, and deeply satisfying, especially when one manages to cause a whole section of the opponent’s land to crumble away and take their important stuff down with it. Watching the board actually get smaller with each turn, rather than just looking darkened, or ruined, really gives the sense that victory must come soon, or not at all.
The board becomes fractured, and difficult to traverse.
Reigns
The controls are easy and intuitive. When the game first arrived, I assumed I would dislike controlling it with the gamepad, thinking that the mouse would be the natural controller for this type of game, but I didn’t have any trouble, or even experience a learning curve.
Noise
The sound effects are all appropriate to the theme of each faction. The background music doesn’t have a huge amount of variety, but it all sounds like old vaudevillian records played on a half-broken Victrola, which is perfect.
Encoding
Unless the internet matchmaking was a bug, nothing seemed to go wrong during play.
Last Word
Greed Corp is a fun, fair board game. At Arcade pricing, it’s worth it for any strategy board game fan to pick up. As with any board game, it’s a lot more fun to play with your friends than against the AI, and once you all learn the game, you can have a fun evening with it—just make sure that someone sacrifices some time to earn all the maps first.
Articles RSS