Corruption 2029 is Mutant Year Zero’s straight to VHS sequel
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies, 2018) got by on quirk and inexplicably charming characters. It was all rough edges and potholes but the unconventional stealth-tactics hybrid had enough confidence to hold the mess together, with the implication that next time around the foundation will have been patched and sanded.
Corruption 2029 (The Bearded Ladies, 2020) definitely plays like a game that’s been polished to bits, but in the way you can sharpen a knife long enough that eventually all you’re left with is a stumpy handle that’s not good for anything. The Bearded Ladies have taken a detour in the wrong direction and even they can’t seem to communicate why.
As a second civil war tears across America, the player takes command of a group of soldiers which are described as remote-controlled husks with guns. They’re still people, but without any agency of their own. They’ve been banished to Get Out’s sunken place and their bodies are being used to fight for a government that may or may not be terrorists, against rebels who may or may not be a cult. Who could say amid all the acronyms and codewords what anybody is actually fighting for?
The snarkiest side of me wants to interpret Corruption 2029’s theme of soulless war and constant resurrection as a commentary on the blandness of contemporary military shooters. But that take hasn’t been hot since Spec Ops: The Line (Yager, 2012) and Corruption 2029 is far too aggressively self-serious to be making a meta-commentary joke at its own expense.
Screenshot courtesy of The Bearded Ladies
Corruption 2029 plays almost identically to Mutant Year Zero - real-time stealth which leads into XCOM like turn-based combat - without any beneficial improvements and one major change that further strips out what little personality the game’s cast has. In Mutant Year Zero each character’s abilities were tied to their species, which meant that from the start everyone had a predefined role in combat that connected with their identity. As every soldier in Corruption 2029 is just a meat suit, weapons and abilities can be swapped between all characters. Theoretically, this opens up a greater range of build options but in execution just alienated me from my entire squad.
I couldn’t tell you their names. I know one of them has a sniper rifle that makes walls explode, and one of them is basically useless because they don’t have a silenced weapon. By opening up the arsenal for every character but not actually filling said arsenal with enough weapons and abilities to make for interesting loadouts, Corruption 2029 heightens mechanical frustrations that previously could be chalked up to scarcity in the wasteland or character-specific preferences.
Corruption 2029 feels like a straight to VHS sequel. Zoomed out it looks like what you’d expect the studio to do next, albeit with a different theme and fewer talking ducks. But there is no soul, no justification for the game’s existence, and numerous moments where it feels actively inferior to a game that came out two years ago. Corruption 2029 trudges along like a proof of concept for Mutant Year Zero that just happened to accidentally get released as a different game. Mistakes happen I guess.
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Corruption 2029 was reviewed using a code provided by the developer. It was reviewed on PC and is available on the Epic Games Store.