Humble Bundle Review: Greed Corp

Valve has dominated Linux gaming news recently, but it’s not the only organisation bringing great games to Linux. Long before Valve showed an interest in Linux, Humble Bundle were bringing great games to the open source OS. I’ve spent the last couple of days working my way through the Humble Bundle 7.

First up has been Greed Corp. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you command a group of free men fighting an evil empire. As with most games of the genre, you harvest resources and use them to build up an arsenal of weapons with which you fight enemy teams.

Screenshot from 2013-10-24 16:38:56

The creators say it’s inspired by the industrial revolutions and there’s a definite steam-punk theme to the graphics.

Unlike many similar games, the earth below starts to fall away as you harvest materials leaving nothing but a chasm where land once was. This means that you have to balance the value of the land as a material resource, and the value of it as land itself. As the battle goes on, the battle field gets smaller and smaller, and a canny player can reshape the arena to suit their forces. This both adds a new tactical dimension to the game, and ensures the game keeps moving at a swift pace. There’s no time to dilly-dally as you have to win before you run out of land. While this won’t be for everyone, it  kept this writer well entertained and I don’t usually like turn-based strategy games.

The game runs on desktop Linux and Android. The game performed reasonably even on my ageing laptop, but the fixed size window opened incorrectly on Gnome 3 fallback. It failed to take into account the height of the bottom bar, so there was always a strip of the graphics missing. This was an annoyance, but didn’t really detract from the game.

At the time of writing, you have five days to get your hands on this and eight more games for the paltry price of … well, whatever you want (it has to be more than $6.28 to get all nine games). What’s more, you can specify for the money to go to charity (Child’s Play and EFF) so buying the games can count as your good deed for the day. To get the bundle, head over to https://www.humblebundle.com/, but be quick. Once the time runs out, it’s not clear whether it’ll still be possible to get the Linux and Android versions. Currently only the Windows version is on Steam.

Over to you readers. Have you purchased the bundle? What did you think of this game?

One Comment

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *