Corruption 2029 is the most recent release from The Bearded Ladies Consulting, developers of last year’s darling Mutant Year Zero. The Bearded Ladies Consulting has a distinct style when it comes to tactics games, which is shown off in Corruption 2029. This game offers up some simple fun, but there are some aspects that hold it back from being an amazing game.

Corruption 2029‘s Reimagined Tactics

The story of Corruption 2029 is fairly straightforward. The United States currently has two opposing military forces that are vying for control of the country. You are the commander of a small unit set on pushing back the opposing forces from your area of operations. During this process, your team comes across lore scattered around different maps in the form of newspaper articles or notes left behind by the former inhabitants.

The overall story is pretty weak and doesn’t provide any drive in terms of moving you through the campaign. You do come across a twist at one point, but it’s telegraphed fairly early and doesn’t really make any meaningful impact.

You need to use stealth to thin out the opposing forces, before the final encounter.

The combat scenarios are what ultimately drive you through the game. They start off fairly easy but do a good job in ramping up the difficulty throughout. Your team isn’t as customizable as teams in other tactics games, but you’re able to change loadouts and abilities in order to suit the challenges you are about to face on your missions. I wish you were able to recruit other soldiers to fight on your team, but the ability to change out weapons and abilities make it so you can diversify when needed.

Tactical Stealth

You spend the majority of each stage free roaming around the play area and picking people off utilizing stealth. This makes it easier for when you actually engage a group of enemies because there are fewer combatants for the encounter. However, there were multiple times I accidentally alerted enemies when I felt that I shouldn’t have.

I wish there were some type of indication on how far the sound of a gunshot will travel. There were multiple times I had to save scum because I was just a couple steps off that invisible boundary.

Making sure you utilize silenced weapons makes starting encounters much easier.

Uninspired Dystopia

The aesthetic for this game is fairly bland. I like the red-on-black glow of this near future early cyberpunk look, but it gets old fairly quickly. The game does a good job in setting up the in-game reasoning for this tactics style, but I would have liked to see the game have more of a personality.

Mutant Year Zero had so much style and charm in the characters and environment, it’s hard not to think that if this game had more development time, it could have become equally charismatic. Throughout the game, you wind up playing through the same stages over and over, which had me wanting each new chapter to move on to a different setting. By reusing the same maps, I got fairly burned out by the end of the game.

By the end of the game, enemy units are on high alert.

Overall, I think this game would be a pretty good way to introduce someone to a tactics game. It keeps things simple and straightforward. There are some good encounters that will have you wondering how it’ll be possible to make it through, but those are really only in the final chapter of the game. I like the stealth elements that The Bearded Ladies Consulting have tied into their tactics games; I just hope their next one has a bit more personality and charm tied in as well.

Corruption 2029 is out now for PC on the Epic Games store for $19.99.

(Disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this game for review purposes.)