Cruelty
Squad

Cruelty Squad (2021) is a shooting game where you play a gun-for-hire in a nightmarish world ruled by corporations and violence. You carefully decide how to approach each level, be it gunning down everyone in your path and harvesting their organs to maximise profit, or stealthily (but less profitably) assassinating. It stands out not only for its collage of basic and abrasive visuals, but also for the underlying, satirical anti-capitalist narrative you uncover through the people you leave alive.

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In the not-so-distant future, biological augmentation means death is only temporary, making violence and mass killing commonplace as corporations compete for market share. You play a grunt in Cruelty Squad, a division sent to do your conglomerate overlords' dirty work. Play involves traversing each stage in search of your target, using different guns to kill them and anyone who gets in your way. Each stage is very open-ended, so you must decide the best path and approach to kill your target, from surgical precision to maximum firepower.

As you progress, you piece together more about the world through embedded textual messages and talking to people. By collecting organs from your victims, you make money you can invest in the stock market, betting on and against companies you work for or terrorise. You also unlock new weapons and a grappling hook, which opens up more movement options and ways to advance through each stage.

The result is a visual pastiche of a game that uses its over-the-top violence and destruction to present a ruthless satire of excessive capitalism and corporate greed. The presentation, violence, and lack of punishment for needless killing are hard to stomach, but for those who persist, there's a surprisingly well-thought-out, murky existence to engage with.

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Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Cruelty Squad 12 weeks ago. It was re-examined by Thom Robertson and updated 8 weeks ago.