Developer: Sam DeMinico
Publisher: Self Published
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Corporate America – Review
When thinking of America, one can’t help but think about the land of freedom and dreams. You’d immediately imagine yourself drowning in cash, if you simply got that one opportunity that would get you set for life. To celebrate capitalism and in order to blow off some steam at the job, you shall participate in a friendly office brawl. In Corporate America, you decide to grab some office supplies and battle your co-workers to earn some money, show that you are a real patriot or just tag the most colleagues. At least, this is the concept of the game. Sadly, we weren’t able to see the full potential of this title due to a lack of actual players playing the game.
Story
Corporate America is that game that when you boot it up, you immediately get dropped in a lobby. This means that the only way to know the story is to check out the Steam store page. It’s supposedly all about a story in which humans have been replaced by AI and are now forced to do mindless tasks over and over again, which was originally the job of the now all-powerful AI. Well, you don’t really notice much of this as everything seems to be made for human interaction, yet the absence of the story doesn’t affect gameplay since this title is a simple arcade shooter.
Graphics
Corporate America doesn’t look like much as the graphics are really simple and there isn’t much attention to detail. The weapons that are in use represent the tools you will find around the office such as books, phones, with some uniquely created melee weapons thrown in the mix. Offices seem empty, player models are very simple and even though everything is at low resolution, the game suffers from serious performance issues. Frame rate isn’t stable and there were no options found to adjust the settings.
Sound
The one thing that the game does get right is the music. A generic office music track plays in the background while waiting in the lobby which you will get used to this as you will have to wait for long times until you find someone else that plays this abandoned game. Sound effects are simple, which eventually suffices for a game such as this.
Gameplay
Corporate America is an online First Person Shooter where you have fun wars in the office while getting paid, working from nine to five. As this game is an online-only title you would at least expect that there are AI opponents. The latter would solve the problem of an unknown title that is treading in the depths of an online community that still lacks a proper player base. This meant that we were often the only available players during an evening.
In theory, this game does have a few promising aspects. For starters, you can play this game with up to sixteen players, either online or even better, in LAN mode. LAN has been a dying breed in games and while LAN-parties are still popular these days, it has become harder to find games to still support this feature. Next, you can decide to either host your game with two teams or a royal rumble between four teams. Each section is represented by a department: IT, Sales, Legal and HR.
The three game modes are what you regularly find in FPS typed games. Patriotism will make you feel honored to capture the American stars and stripes. It’s your goal to grab as many flags as you can in this Capture the Flag game mode. If you rather take down as many co-workers as possible then Patiencematch is the simple solution to your needs. A new mode named Capitalism will have you working hard, to earn as much cash as possible during the match.
It is strange that such a simple game with not many visuals has such performance issues. We tested the game on a system that can easily play the latest games on ultra and while trying out Corporate America there were a lot of issues regarding stuttering, frame drops, and overall performance issues. For this reason, it was thought that the game would still be in Early Access, but the game has been completely released to the public. The servers are dead and with no bots filling the empty spots it seems that this game first needs a lot of traction, some optimization or switch over to a free-to-play model in order to get its servers crowded.
Conclusion
While Corporate America seems like a nice game with a few modes, the current only selling point could be that it’s interesting to play in a LAN setting. Graphics and sound are very simple and strangely enough, it has some real performance issues. While the addition of bots to fill in servers could have raised the score by a bit, this game could not be decently tested due to the absence of other players.
Corporate America – Review,
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