Corporate Fury

Many people fantasise about attacking their bosses with a blunt instrument, but the company at the heart of Corporate Fury positively encourages it.

In this dystopian future, the only way to get to the top of your brutal field is to work your way up the corporate ladder one death-match at a time.

It’s a wickedly enticing premise, and one that developer Swinecrafters takes to the extreme. It gets carried away, in fact, leading to a game with bags of potential but an awful lot of flab.

At its heart, Corporate Fury is an arena-based beat-‘em-up. You take on a string of zany rivals in return for credits. One of my favourites is the man with no arms – watch out for his kicks.

The fighting is a scruffy, punishing affair that refuses to ease you in gently. It’s all about capitalising on mistakes, and once your opponent is down you can really press home your advantage.

This works the other way, too, which unfortunately tends to lead to a reliance on a couple of effective tactics while ignoring the enormous roster of moves at your disposal.

Additional moves and items can be bought with credits earned from your matches, the latter of which includes armour, weapons (such as machetes and knives), and single use items such as bombs and medkits.

There’s a welcome sense of humour, with cowboy hats, afros, and clown noses imbuing your fighter with special abilities – and providing plenty of cheap chuckles to boot.

The game’s biggest problem is its ill-advised attempt to build a free-roaming hub. The amount of movement required between fights, the shop, and your living quarters saps the game of momentum, to the point where it can rob you of the will to return.

What’s more, the controls in town are sluggish and ill-suited to your environment. Why design a series of switchback ramps when your character has the turning radius of an oil tanker?

This unnecessarily expanded (and pretty risque, it should be noted) world also means that the game’s uglier than it needs to be. Character models are low on detail and the world is the kind of bland, boxy affair last seen in a PC game circa 1998.

With more focus on its undoubted strengths – chiefly its brutal and darkly humourous arena battles – Corporate Fury could have been a cult iPhone classic. It’s still good fun as it stands, but its lack of focus and open world bloat make it something of an acquired taste.