Tonight We Riot

For all of our lives, we were told that political violence solved nothing. That it was the tool of madmen who were acting out of a misguided sense of altruism. And yet we are rapidly entering a world were we will have to confront how it is indeed the answer to our problems, and how soon it may be the only tool left to us. ...Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right, the game. Eh. I can't say I didn't have fun, but this game is NOT worth fifteen bucks. You can beat it in less than three hours. The trailers made this game look awesome, but there's really not a lot to it. I do wanna say that "you control a group of Communist revolutionaries like it's Pikmin" is a brilliant, creative and unique idea for a game, but there is so much more they could have done with it than this. The levels are short and largely repetitive. The bosses are nothing you haven't seen before. The controls feel janky and unresponsive. The jokes aren't funny enough to warrant how heavy-handed and obvious the message is (and to be clear, I'm not disparaging the message. The last thing I want this review to come off like is me complaining about the game's politics, which even if I didn't already like are irrelevant to the gameplay experience). I can't help but feel this idea would've worked WAY better as a roguelike than a beat-em-up with finite, static levels. You can milk a lot of replay value out of even a short roguelike, and the whole mechanic of amassing an army of revolutionaries would feel a lot more impactful and fun if you had to start from scratch or retreat to some kind of hideout each time you lost where you amass your acquired resources and manpower for next time. But the game is also just missing that special sauce in general, something that makes it stand out besides its hardline political stance. I can tolerate a lot of bad gameplay if you give me strong writing, but the game doesn't really have a story beyond the handful of couch gags at the start of every level, so there's no characters or themes to get attached to beyond very broad anti-capitalism that I could just go play The Outer Worlds if I wanted to see, where the characters and writing are top-notch. In short, this game is remarkably mediocre, overpriced and doesn't do anywhere near what I expected with the potential for its concept based on the trailers that got me interested. I'm glad this was gifted to me so I didn't have to spend fifteen bucks on it, and you shouldn't have to either.