Review by: Michael Barnes

Don’t let the fact that you can only play it on Xbox Live or the Playstation Network fool you- W! Games’ Greed Corp is a bona fide board game sans cardboard and you don’t even have to get three other friends over to your place on a Friday night to play it.

The turn-based strategy game could have been printed up in a board game format and boxed to be shelved alongside tabletop classics such as Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne without missing a beat. Seasoned board gamers will likely be reminded of games such as the abstract Zertz and the long out-of-print and fairly obscure Full Metal Planete, but Greed Corp stakes its claim by offering an accessible and fun-to-play boardgaming experience that is fairly unique in its gameplay among its console peers.

Set in W! Games’ proprietary “Mistbound” setting, Greed Corp pits two to four players in a tense struggle for that most valuable of commodities—land—in a world inspired not only by the Industrial Revolution but also by the environmental devastation it has fostered. Over the course of the game, players are tasked with striking a balance between conquering and holding hexagonal land tiles high above a misty fog and mining them for resources. Each tile has a height of one to four layers, and every time a tile is harvested or struck by cannon fire, its height is reduced. Once a tile is completely strip-mined of resources, anything on it collapses into the nothingness below. Over the course of the game, land becomes scarce as tiles fall into oblivion. The goal is to be the last faction standing, meaning that the winner is the player who has claimed land remaining. To that end, player elimination is not just a mechanic- it’s the primary agenda for all involved parties.

It’s a compelling mechanic, and a fairly original one even when comparing the game to its tabletop peers. I was particularly impressed at how the concept successfully conveys the game’s environmental subtext, and it’s not without irony that in order to win the game you essentially have to destroy the world. I don’t know of another board game or video game out there where taking over land to exploit it literally means its destruction and removal from the game. When Harvester units are built on conquered tiles, they essentially doom the hexes they are on and all adjacent ones to eventual collapse. But you’ve got to have resources to build Armories, which in turn build Walkers (the game’s military unit). Purchasing a Cannon or two, which decimates stacks of Walkers and reduces terrain levels, is definitely worth sacrificing some land to finance. And once real estate becomes limited and tiles become cut off from each other, an expensive Transport is the only way to move Walkers to remote locations.

Toward the end of a game, you’re going to need those one-use Transports, and probably several of them which can be very difficult to afford as resources become scarce. I’ve seen many games come down to literally two factions each with only one or two hexes remaining on opposite sides of the former board, which can be pretty exciting, tense, and nerve-wracking. But as a result, the game can be ruthlessly unforgiving of any mistake in judgment—particularly during the later campaign stages or against more difficult AI or human opponents. What’s more, Greed Corp is a deterministic game, meaning that there are no luck elements at all. There are no simulated dice, cards, or other random factors. Combat between Walkers is strictly a 1:1 resolution, meaning that five Walkers versus three will leave the winner two in the target hex.

Greed Corp, therefore, turns out to be quite a difficult game and although I appreciate the challenge, particularly against live opponents of some skill, playing against the AI opponents even at the lowest skill level can be frustrating since games can literally come down to one or two decisive moves. It also has the feeling that many deterministic games have where there tends to be a certain, sometimes unnoticed point over the course of a session where a couple of key choices can literally foreclose on any chance of victory. What’s worse is that there is no way to “take back” moves and it is strictly operates on the old “a piece laid is a piece played” rule which can be very irritating when you intend to send 16 Walkers across the board in an invasion and you accidentally send only one. When that happens at the end of a thirty minute game, it’s enough to send you straight back to the Dashboard looking for a different game to play.