Conglomerate 451 by developer RuneHeads and publishers 34BigThings and 1C Publishing—PC (Steam) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Having taken a look at Conglomerate 451 back in early October, this Cyberpunk, Team Based, First Person Dungeon Crawler with a clone army is finally ready and I’ll be damned if it isn’t glorious. After a botched mission, that you were designed to fail at to test your mettle, you are given a promotion of being Director at an agency designed to clean up the 451 ward of the city Conglomerate. With plenty of cloning options at hand and the ability to research more, your only limitations are how far you’re personally willing to go.
Overall, between the preview and the fully launched version, not much has changed. There’s more in the narrative department and the gameplay is loads smoother as I haven’t had a single bug yet. Otherwise? It plays just as smoothly and offers just as much smooth dungeon crawling than it used to. The major bonus? Conglomerate 451 now has controller support if you feel like just putting your feet up on the coffee table!
Taking it from the top for those of you joining us now, Conglomerate 451 is a first person dungeon crawler that has you select teams of three for missions into the various areas of the district in order to reduce the influence of the companies. Selecting specialists from a variety of backgrounds to get the work done, there's no right answer but you'll soon find strategies with each specialist that either work great for certain enemies or that overall work for you.
Moving through the "dungeons" you'll be taking step by step in similar laid out dungeons that come in a variety of visuals from dirty cyberpunk slums to fancy atriums with pretty colors. Your goals in these locations is what will change and what you find inside will either make you gleefully happy as you uncover more tech points for research, or sweat with dread as your team becomes battered and bruised from the physical attacks and the strain of their cybernetic implants.
The idea of your units needing to heal up and recover isn't a new one but Conglomerate 451 does it well. Only having to deal with physical traumas in the first few weeks, the toxicity levels of your implants only come out to play once you've had time to get familiar with the mechanics and have time to look over what kinds of research that you wanted to specialize in. New tanks for healing physical wounds and new tanks for toxin removals are nice as you can do more units at a time, but, you also want to look into new bonuses for new clones as you're going to need more than one group on hand to send out.
If there had to be a downside to all of this clone business, it would be that clones can die and the experience that they earned goes with them. Yes, you can make new ones. Yes, your new clones are already a notch above their predecessors. But man does it suck. Hell, even if you retire a clone because you have too many others that are in healthier conditions, it doesn't give you anything more than an extra slot in your overall roster.
So a little like The Stranger of Sword City, you'll want to rotate your lower level characters into higher level missions with veteran troops, or, put all of your newbies into low level missions while your higher level heal up. How you approach this is entirely up to you, but you'll want more than one group ready to go and with clones? You can literally have multiple same set up groups on rotation so that it always FEELS like it's the same team.
So overall, especially for fans of dungeon crawlers, Conglomerate 451 is worth it. With plenty of missions with different objectives to keep you going and tons of research to make better and better versions of your squads, taking a city back from evil corporations will keep you both entertained and occupied for quite a while.
Score: 8.5 / 10
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