I came back to Cruelty Squad today and it’s still fucking great. Repugnant, disgusting game, like an open wound oozing over with pus.
You play a dissociated gig hitman in a corporate bio-dystopia who is contracted by a megacorp’s higher ups to whack subsidiary executives that get too uppity or full of themselves. Cook and eat human flesh, bunnyhop everywhere, go fishing, and in the end shoot some dosh junky in the face with a silenced pistol.
Functionally, it pulls from a lot of disparate games. The levels are laid out like Hitman, with tons of alternate paths and secrets to uncover, with level mastery being an important goal. The gunplay itself feels akin to Rainbow Six, because you are very squishy and enemies are dumb as hell, so you have to play tactically. Finally, there’s a ton of augments and weird interactions you can find in the levels, which smacks of Deus Ex and other immersive sims.
Lots of unlocks between levels too. Spend your money to get the aforementioned augments that do stuff like grapple around levels or jetpack with pus feet, carry weapons out of a level to unlock them for your loadout, and even play a stock market simulation with livers and brains.
It has an aesthetic that I would generally describe as “technicolor puke”. All of the textures are bright and surrealistic, lacking detail except in the grossest possible way (like the lips on humans). The music is dissonant and loud. Lots of pulsating meat.
There’s just so much creativity and love for shooters here that it’s hard not to be impressed. It’s Quake for people who like giallo, Rainbow Six for disaffected anarchists, maximalist game design in the best possible way.
Highly recommend playing it, especially if you’re looking for a game that’s genuinely unique. Sure, it has some clear inspirations, but the end result is so divergent from its individual components that it’s almost impossible to describe.