Army Corps of Hell

If you think the title is awful, wait until you play the game.



Don't be fooled by the fact that SE was involved.

 The idea behind this game is that you're controlling an army of minions, in this case they are goblin-looking things, and you need to fight your way through hellish landscapes to regain your position in the ranks.  The core game play has you moving your skeleton general around from platform to platform while you throw your minions at whatever assortment of monsters jumps up at you for the 50th time.

Once you chuck a few of your little guys onto an enemy they start using whatever weapon they're equipped with based upon the type of minion they are.  Soldiers use swords, Spearmen are obviously equipped with spears, and Magi use staves.  Each type of minion has a different special attack and are useful against different enemies.  Soldiers generally do the most damage with a special attack, Spearmen attack monsters that come close to them, and Magi have a good distance strike.  There's not much else to this thing; you move from stage to stage killing things with the same old strategy.  It gets boring very quickly.

It's tricky; looks like it could be good, but it's really not.

To spice it up a bit, you can alter the # of each minion type you have in your army at one time.  Some combos are better than others, but for the most part it doesn't really matter.  The customization options are very limited.  There are different weapons and items to create, you collect materials to make them from fallen monsters, but there's very little reason to not use the newest one that you've created.  Why allow for customization if it doesn't matter?

You can also equip different hats for your minions and different cloaks for your general.  Once again though, the newest one is going to be the best and you run into the same issue with the weapons and items.  IF the customizability was better, this could be a fun game.  I've already mentioned that the combat is really bland, but even more bland is the variety of enemies you encounter. 

You fight the same stupid creatures over and over again.  Once you've seen a set of monsters, the game switches it up by changing their colors and adding an ability.  Yeehaw.  Honestly, I could only play this game for up to ten stages, and after that I just gave up because I couldn't stand it.  I think the only thing that I was really impressed with in this entire pile of crap was the music; that was freaking awesome.  It's all heavy-death-metal-ish and not anything like the rest of the game.  I would buy the soundtrack for this game any day.

I expected a LOT more from Square-Enix's first title on the PSVita, especially since it's a strategy game.  I know that the Vita is still pretty new and that the system is still finding its own niche of games, but this garbage shouldn't have ever existed.  The worst part is that it's basically a horribly butchered Overlord port from the Xbox 360.  Overlord featured similar combat and customization options, but fleshed it out more.  You get a castle, a forge, different spells, etc.

Had SE taken even a small amount of the lessons that came from Overlord, I could have seen Army Corp of Hell being a decent game.  Since they decided to go a different direction, I feel like this is one of those few times where they really fucked up.  I expected more from you Square-Enix.