Army Corps Of Hell Review

I love being the ruler of worlds. Ok, sure I am not a ruler of any kind of world in real life but within Square Enix’s Army Corps of Hell I was able to pretend I was. As the re-arising demon lord of Hell can you the gamer find any kind of dominating satisfaction from the Vita’s first strategy based game?

Army Corps of Hell borrows the past successes of many popular action strategy games on kind of old. If you are a fan of Nintendo’s Pikmin franchise or Overlord then you will kind of know what to expect here. The fact of the matter is though is that Army Corps is a pretty fun game. Not only does this hellish product bring an excellent level of customization in and out of combat but it also makes you feel like a leader while you do it.

You take control of the fallen king of Hell. In a matter of seconds an old, not so wise sage of a gremlin like race finds you and instantly proclaims you their master. Within those beginning moments it is made clear that you and your ever growing army are going to retake Hell, while also making as much of a bloody, red mess as possible.

As mentioned you take control of the skeletal leader of Hell. While this demonic fellow doesn’t have any kind of attacks that can dish of masterful justice, it is his minions that come packed with a variety of devastating weapons and magic. What is cool about this is that the game promotes a sense of progression equals reward by always outfitting you with some kind of new power or unit during the early sections of the game.

These upgrades in unit strength and power also come with a nice dedication to detail through the minion army’s upgrades. For example your melee based goblins start with little rusty knives but next they receive giant, bone slicing meat cleaver swords. This is constantly evolving thanks to the game’s very accessible crafting system that sees you creating weapons, armour and buff type items for you and your little army of monsters to wield in battle. As I said it is pretty accessible because instead of forcing you to grind out some crazy, rare object of the unknown, you are simply given a list of easy to acquire recipes that not only nudge you to work on improving your mission ranks, but also by progressing through the actual game.

Combat is also set up pretty nicely, especially since this is a game on the Vita. A lot of games have proven to control extremely well on the handheld and Army Corps of Hell is no different. To select your minions you simply press one of the needed right hand side buttons to make your selection. After doing you press the right trigger to either launch your minions at enemies to build up a combo counter, or charge it up to unleash a powerful elemental spell from your pointy eared magi.

This set up allows for a pretty swift ability to change between the available monster types especially since the later levels require you to constantly change back and forth between your flesh and bone tool set. The levels will soon make a test for your tactical reflexes though and the death of your minions will become more and more the norm as an assortment of enemy demons begin upgrading themselves with defence buffs that certain minions can’t scratch. It means that some levels will become a journey of trial and error but not in failure because you are constantly earning loot from the enemies that you kill. Not only do you gain loot from your fallen enemies but they will also drop red orbs of blood that allow you to summon more minions that you are unfortunate to lose in battle, these red orbs also work as currency in your crafting shop and you should be shocked to find yourself cheaply trying to defeat later battles without calling forth more troops.

With solid, accessible gameplay comes a few minor weaknesses to the overall package though. It will be easily noticed that Army Corps of Hell isn’t the prettiest game, at least graphically. Sure the illustrated cutscenes may be a beautiful slideshow of graphic novel style concept art, but the in game visuals and effects will generally come off as dated like an out of style grandparent. This is a shame because the art style can be glorious to behold at times like the hellish main character you control. People looking for gameplay over graphics should be fine though, but I personally feel that if given more time to cook in the oven, Army Corps of Hell could have been a visual treat for the small amount of action that happens on screen at any time anyway.

Finally I come to the soundtrack with is something of two pronged for in the road for any player of this game. Just like the hellish world the game bases itself in, Army Corps’ track list consists of an incredibly small amount of death metal songs that will either have you wanting to pull your ear drums out, or swirling your long metal fro of rock in the air. I personally am not a fan of death metal music but that doesn’t stop me from being open minded. It is actually pretty cool to see how well the music suits the overall atmosphere of the game and its progressing events into the story. With that being said though it is a constant annoyance to hear the same one or two songs over and over again that you may just find yourself slamming down the mute button and playing your own tunes.

Army Corps of Hell is available on Playstation Vita right now!

For more information, click here.