Conglomerate 451 Reviews

The Story Mode for this game lasts 75 weeks. You are asked to kill the bosses of four corporations. Each week is a procedurally generated map, with one of three missions. Kill a guy, Kill all the guys, or find items. After about 20 weeks, you'll have seen as much of this as you would ever want to. You have a base where you can upgrade your technology, agents, etc. You can get to a point where the difficulty (on hard) becomes pretty trivial around week 40. Have two agents spec for 100% crit chance and 80+% defense. Have a third agent that can spam shield healing, and 80+% defense. Done and done. So by week 40, you'll be ready to finish the game. There are four boss stages. They aren't much harder than ordinary stages if you have a decent build. Ok, so it's week 45 of 75 and you're done. That's fine, actually, and if the game ended at this point I would say get it on sale for $5-10. The problem is that the game doesn't end. You get to keep doing the procedural stages which I was tired of at week 20, for another 30 stages. Finally I just failed a bunch of missions to move things along. Also, it turns out the endings are brief text walls, which was disappointing considering the beginning had some graphical sequences to introduce things. I think the developers had a good concept but failed on the execution. Pass.

The game got very repetitive for me. The concept was nice and the visuals look fun but the gameplay couldn't hold up for me.

Hey guys, TLDR: If you like dungeon crawlers, especially futuristic (ala Starcrawlers) there is a good chance you will like this game too. Conglomerate 451 is set in and under (water) a cyberpunk style city. Actually my favourite map is the 'entry' cityscape. I love the look and the rain/water effects are pretty nice. Would liked to have had missions based in an offshoot of the outdoor area but currently all missions are enclosed. After the tutorial mission you can skip this part and head straight to the mission, which i do not recommend as buffs and map hacks and shopping can be done in the city and can make the mission itself more rewarding and easier. You as the Director of your corporation are in charge of recruiting agents to perform the main missions of the game. This is done by creating your own clones. They each have a class, four skills to pick out of a small list (which you can swap out later if you wish - losing any advancement in them though) and a select dna trait. You do not start with any but with research you can unlock more. So essentially the clones that come later will have a bit of an advantage in this matter. The initial classes you can pick are the Soldier (DPS/Tank), Infiltrator (Sniper) and drifter (support) but others unlock as you progress. These are the Splicer (healer), the Bodyguard (Tank/support), the Techie (Hacker/support), the Juicer (Nutjob... i mean someone who gets much stronger when abusing drugs but will suffer for it) and finally the Binary (mini DPS/Support). You can go through the game with no problems with just the initial three but i prefer the Soldier/Infiltrator + either Bodyguard/Binary. Credits and tech (Tech essentially a crafting/training resource needed for pretty much everything except unlocking memories (more on that later)) are the resources you need to advance. Aside from the usual shield/hit points you have two smaller bars for Pain (combat damage) and intoxication (drug use and some enemy attacks). As these build up you can end up with negative trauma/disorders which if not treated in healing/detox tanks within a certain amount of weeks these problems become permanent. You are given a percentage chance of how successful treatment for each issue can be resolved per week in the tanks. Between missions you spend time at your Headquarters where you can clone more troops, heal and detox your agents. try to unlock memories, research the various trees (Clone/health/training/Military and Cyber), view the agent graveyard where your failures go, Directors office (overview), train and manage agent skills and slot mods into weapons, shields, cyberdeck (for hacking - doors, containers and people) and even cyborg parts you can unlock via research. Careful though add too many new body parts in a short time can cause the agent to die of cardiac arrest as i found out :) though you are given a heart rate que which of course ignored first time! There is a background pre-story which i wont spoil and to find out about it you must find and unlock (hack) memories of the past. You find on occasion these pulsing orbs on a level which you can hack and if successful you end up with one of the 20 memories that need decrypting at H.Q. To do so you decide how much money you are going to throw at the problem with a min of 5k. Essentially you are buying a better percentage to unlock but RNG being what it can be i have spent fortunes before finally managing it. The main goal is to take out the Leaders of four rival factions to make allegedly the city district safer. There is no story that runs concurrently with the present. Wow review getting to long (you can probably tell i dont usually write them :) ), so i will sum up in the usual fashion. Pros + Cyberpunk (for me anyway). Stable - not one crash in 87 hours or so. Pretty decent looking for what it is on max settings and fluid gameplay. Decent controller support. Lots of customisation. Good price. I certainly got my moneys worth! Trauma/disorder mechanic that feels Darkest Dungeon esq. Cons - Cannot customise agent other than tattoos with a change of portrait direction. The five biomes (random gen) other than the city could use more variation in my opinion but is ok. Once you take out the 4 bosses which you can do fairly early (20-30 weeks), even on hard you are left with just random content to finish the game at 75 weeks. Some achievements do not unlock till you do this. So if you are an achievement whore you must grind for it. Endings are to the point but compared to the intro upon starting a new game seems rushed and VERY abrupt, though hints of a sequel maybe in the offing :) Im sure there are more things to say both positive and negative but i do recommend the game, it is addictive and im planning my third replay to get the third ending. Cheers!

[H1]Need your Cyberpunk fix whilst CDPR are busy putting the finishing touches to the game that will eat your life? Ever wondered what Satellite Reign would be like as a turn based RPG? Well, you can scratch that itch. Thoroughly.[/H1] This is a rare beast. Meet an example of Early Access done correctly. The game started off somewhat basic but with a good core concept. A cyberpunk version of Legend of Grimrock but with Turn Based Combat and with stellar music and graphics. That concept then got refined and added to over several months with the introduction of narcotics, with better hacking, with the ability to delve into a mini cyberspace layer, with a timed campaign where you need to complete your objectives within a fixed number of weeks (thankfully Endless mode was retained for people like me who just like farming and blowing stuff up). Polish was layered on, bugs were fixed and new classes were added until eventually the 1.0 version stands before us now. With a solid tutorial and intro that drops you into the game and gives you a thorough idea of how the game works, but not quite so hand-holdy that you feel like you're being spoon fed everything. The game still expects you to do some legwork and learn how to minmax your team, there's still some QoL refinements that could be worked on, but by and large where we've got to now is worlds ahead of where we began. This is a very full blooded dungeon crawler with brilliant surroundings, enemies that will punish you if you get too cocky, and a suite of upgrades that force you to often make tradeoffs as to what kind of build you'll be gunning (literally) for with your teams. [H1]Syndicate meets Starcrawlers meets Cyberpunk, and the result is an effective and addictive dose of dystopia.[/H1] Your missions start out in the overworld city level (EDIT: You can optionally skip this now at least in endless mode, but I'd really recommend you do not), where your meat and veg is discovery of transit that takes you to your mission zone as well as accessing randomly generated vendors and dealing with, or avoiding street thugs who act as attrition encounters (as well as sources of credits, tech, and mods). Once through them you enter your target mission zone via elevator, and enter one of several brilliantly detailed and featured areas, the graphics here are genuinely high quality, and the enemies are well designed and in keeping with the theme. Praise really does need to be heaped on the art design team, the level geometry is some of the best I've seen in a dungeon crawler, you're not going to get bored of these environments even after several hours farming the same places over and over. The music, similarly, works well, and the menus in the corp screens where you manage your merry little band of misfits along with the combat beats are solid, well delivered and make sure you're always "in the environment", whilst the sound effects themselves vary a bit in quality this is forgivable on account of the soundtrack being -really- good. Again, it's not something you're going to get tired of even after extensive farming runs. [H1]Any downsides?[/H1] There's a -few- but we're into "Nice to haves", things which probably were limited by the constraints of Early Access. Being able to insert more than one DNA mutation into new clones at an exponentially increasing cost would be useful, since some mutations are strictly more useful and others more situational. Cyberhacking in combat still needs too many clicks right now, this could be rectified by adding them as additional skills as a second row in the combat skill palette. The Research tree could be cleaned up (It's still very much about passive gains, many of which could be rolled into more important nodes), and one or two of the classes could do with some extra love. That's about it. Everything else is great. Oh, and possibly the ability to have permanent upgrades for the drone. But that one has been on my dream wish list ever since we could tinker with the thing. [H1]Closing thoughts[/H1] Do you like dungeon crawlers? If so, this one is an easy win. At this price point, you'd be nuts not to get involved. Do you like the idea of a cyberpunk dungeon crawler? Ditto. This game set out with a very definite design goal. It's pretty much -nailed- that and done quite a bit more on top. For an Early Access triumph, I'm quite happy to see that it turned out pretty much as hoped. Verdict: [b]Highly recommended, especially to fans of Dungeon Crawlers who fancy a change of pace[/b] [i]Written for [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/balancepatchers]Balance Patch[/url], if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics[/i]

Not really a terrible game but not really good either. It has aspects of both roguelike and traditional RPGs but not necessarily any of the good aspects. The story is minimal, the dungeons are randomly generated repetitive crap, the quests are generic "fetch X" or "kill Y" quests and the combat is boring and repetitive. It also has a bunch of poorly explained character and equipment upgrade mechanics that are pretty confusing. This game just lacks any of the fun of a good roguelike or old-school RPG.

This game has great visual design, and some good ideas behind bodypart targeting and hacking, choosing DNA for cloning. Even some interesting hacking mini games. But the core gameplay just is not fun. I really wanted to see what would happen with the story and the rest of the features this game had to offer, but the combat was boring, and the music is just uninteresting. I found myself just wishing I was doing something that I enjoyed.

Seems like this could be a very decent title with a few QoL changes. Just to name a few things that I think would help a lot: - Let us turn off the god damn android voice, please. - Why are we forced to go into the city, facing the same boring enemies EVERY TIME to sell stuff? It's actually such a silly "feature" and it just makes the player hate his life. - HEAVILY tone down the disorder/trauma system. I did ONE mission and each of my 3 units got 5-7 disorders and traumas. IN ONE MISSION. On a side note, just adressing what I think is a massive issue in the game: - Balance is really just fucked, you go from the easiest missions on the planet, to random boss battles that are near impossible. Some of the unit classes are just straight up worthless (bodyguard, techie just to name 2) The normal missions just running around exploring, killing dudes or looking for stuff works fine, they're a little repetitive, but that's fine. Also a MASSIVELY missed opportunity to have a cyberpunk/dystopian future themed game but not using any of the fantastic music artists out there. This game could've been absolutely MINT condition with some Pertubator, Carpenter Brut, Toxic Avenger, The Midnight.. Just to name a few. tl;dr I like the game, it's fairly fun, but there are some really annoying features and RNG elements that heavily detract from the game experience. Is it worth 16.99€?(At the time of writing this review) Maybe. (If the game gets some love from the devs, I'll revisit the game in the future, and hopefully give it a nice recommendation)

Edit: Like I hoped, the first update has addressed some of the issues I mention. That's a good sign that the developers are paying attention to people, and bodes well for the future. The game has been officially released for all of 24 hours as I write this. No doubt patches will make a lot of my gripes obsolete before too long. I think the easiest way to describe Conglomerate 451 would be "What if Bullfrog classic Syndicate Wars, but Grimrock/Star Crawlers exploration and turn based combat, with a little X-Com base management between missions?" You run some government agency which has just set up in the city of Conglomerate, which is wholly owned by corporations and utterly infested with corruption and crime, with the mission to restore order by using massive amounts of firepower, immediately letting us know we're in present-day America and you're basically flinging clones of dangerously unhinged and over-armed police at the problems until they go away. Ok, it's a *little* more nuanced than that, but the game essentially boils down to sending cloned operatives out on missions, securing resources, and using the time between missions to develop your agency's training, research and development departments. Research new technologies, agent skills, weapons, character classes, DNA enhancements, cybernetics, and more. Your clones can develop physical and mental injuries during play, so do you put a valued agent into a healing tank for a week to fix that dislocated shoulder or do you keep them in the field and risk the damage becoming permanent? There's a week of downtime between missions, and you have 75 weeks in total to take down all the main corporations. You get to unlock new areas of the city as you progress, which keeps the environments from getting stale. Missions vary from "find the maguffin" to assassinations requiring a mix of combat and multiple hacking minigames, which can be as simple as a timed button press, or as complicated as a timed word search in a constantly scrolling sea of similar phrases. They break up the exploration and combat quite nicely, and can offer some very nice loot to upgrade your agents' equipment. Combat is a simple turn-based affair, very much like Star Crawlers, but where Star Crawlers cuts away to a separate, static map for each encounter, here it happens in situ, very much like Legend of Grimrock, but turn-based. You can initiate combat at range which is a good idea when attacking melee enemies as you'll get some free shots in. And if you manage to flank the group before starting the fight you can ambush them. Various abilities cause damage, buff and debuff and mess with the initiative order, and some attacks cause bonus damage or effects if the target has one or more status effects active. There's lots of potential for setting up some massive damage moves, but the enemies can do the same. It all works quite nicely, and I've nothing really to complain about. That's not to say the game doesn't have issues, it's definitely a little rough around the edges; the cityscapes look great while some character models can look very uncanny valley or cartoonish in texture; Voice acting varies from good to quite poor; The dialogue and text (for the English, anyway) need more proofreading for typos, general grammar and some really odd mistakes (as a microbiologist I cringed so very hard at the thought of a virus being used as a "bacteriological weapon". Viruses make virological weapons, bacteria make bacteriological ones! They're completely different in almost every way!); The repetitive quips from your little floating robot guide get old very quickly; And there are a couple of small annoyances such as the glitch animations and sounds being rather... unpleasant on the ears. I get that glitches are *supposed* to be unpleasant but perhaps sacrificing realism for the sake of less nails-across-the-blackboard effects would have been a better choice. But. But the game gets a lot more right than wrong. Apart from the above problems, the graphics and sound are excellent. The mechanics are straightforward enough, but offer quite a bit of depth in terms of skill and research trees. The imposed time limit of 75 weeks will keep the story more focused than Star Crawlers' "here's infinity missions you can do between plot sections" approach, while the "Endless" mode does away with the plot and lets you clean up Conglomerate forever in a state of perpetual war, just like US police forces have always dreamed. So. I think it's a good game, and if the studio takes on feedback and sorts out these niggling issues, it can end up being a great game. Whether you want to wait for a patch or two to come out before buying is up to you, but there's a good solid game here, no mistake.

It's Starcrawlers, but Cyberpunk. And without the charm, the enemy variety, the plot, the character building, the consistent theme... It's kind of a mess because the concept is neat, and the game makes a strong impression at the start. But then it falls off hard when you find there are only six locations and you will see all the enemies you're ever going to see on the first visit. Your agents gain levels, but the bonuses are very minor and don't make the agent much stronger; most of your power comes from your gear and skills. And the skills can be numerically improved but the ones you start the game with are all you get. Since there's so very little plot (and the plot missions are basically just normal missions) you'll see all the content in the game early. ...which wouldn't be so bad... except that even if you complete the game's central objective of "kill all the corp bosses", you still have to play out 75 weeks of the game to finish it up. Screw that. It's also got some major balance problems. A lot of the bonuses you can get are irrelevantly small; +2% HP (when your base is 50-ish. Oh boy, one hit point!), or +2% damage, for example. But on the other end of the scale you can, quite easily, push an agent to a 100% crit rate very, very early on in the game, and then just curbstomp everything you come across. If you take the soldier (who can recharge shields), the infiltrator (for damage), and any sort of support character, you're basically invincible and combats are over almost as soon as they begin. And you can ignore all the defensive upgrades and just take the "If you have X% of your battery left, get 50% damage reduction" upgrades to make things even less of a threat. All the game's written lore comes in 20 'echoes' that serve as a money sink and, all added together, make up about one single note's worth of lore from most other games. In summary, great concept, but incredibly disappointing once you get past the beginning. Special mention to the drone that follows you around and makes witty remarks that get old very quickly. It's completely out of place in the tone of an otherwise very serious Cyberpunk game and has a pool of lines way too small for the number of times you'll hear it speak. But the devs must have known, because they gave the drone's voice its very own volume slider.

Blobbers are my favorite type of game, so I'll play any of them I can get my hands on, have been since the 80s. This game is just....boring and bad. First of all, there is no manual(manual link on Steam doesn't go to a manual) and no in-game help to tell you about many gameplay mechanics. As such, some of the skills make no sense when you hover over them. Decided I was done with this game when I used a skill in combat that stunned the character that used it for 3 turns...and nothing in the pop-up explains why. Combat is slow and boring...same ole same ole. Levels look pretty, but so far they all look the same and have basically the same layout. Played a few missions and never found a single secret passage, secret lever, or anything...a hallmark of blobbers is missing here. During combat you can get pain and disorders, game does nothing to explain how to address those, figure it yourself I guess. You can start combat from a distance, but you can't move to close on mobs. Somehow the mobs can close on you from a far distance and then get to attack. None of this is explained. Silly. UI is as un-inuitive as it comes. Hold right click to see your characters? Hold right click to hack? Hacking mini-game is timing pressing the enter key or read "code lines" and clues and click the right ones. Boring. Honestly not much positive to write about this game other than it's pretty I guess. Avoid this one.