one of the deepest and most involved story games I've ever played. the graphics are artfully garbage and the textures, while looking sketch, tie the themes of the game together with the story. the world of cruelty squad is incredibly dark, life is worth nothing due to technological advancements, and your job is to kill people, usually the super rich who betray the wishes of the super rich that pay you. you can surgically install implants that give you certain advantages, usually at the cost of something else, you can find and buy guns that do insane sh1t, and just as easily get killed by the enemies using them. this game has an incredibly high skill ceiling, and for the price, is the best game I think I've ever invested in. You can eat corpses, steal their organs and sell them for money, you can swim to an island and borrow a nice man's fishing rod (or kill him and he never comes back), fishing for money, you can even invest in stocks that update constantly. making you money or losing all of it.

while the "hehe silly random" aspect does exist, it accents the themes of the game perfectly and I honestly prefer how over-sized and easily recognizable the icons are. late stage implants and weapons are overpowered as sh1t but that's how the game is supposed to be. you receive direct upgrades above early game enemies. while most games go for a more fair approach to enemy npcs, this game sees them in an RPG way, more as low tier enemies you later d1ck on with late-stage items.

[spoilers ahead, review is otherwise complete, if you're reading this before buying, stop here]

giant enemies that can seem impossible to kill when you first encounter them seem like mere inconveniences and sometimes helpful assets later, such as the swamp gasser who you can bait to shoot near your target and riot patrol them to death. necromechs can't be killed with bullets, and when you first see them, they terrify the sh1t out of you, but once you get any of the anti-armour rounds, they're just normal enemies that are easier to hit and move slower. shock troopers move fast, and do a lot of damage, but when you get a sniper, rocket launcher, or nailgun, they're minor inconveniences. the nailers from neuron activator will instantly drain your health, but if you see them before they see you, they have the same amount of armor as the security guards in pharmakokinetiks, so you can one-tap them with the default silenced pistol and pick up the best gun in the game.

SPEAKING OF GUNS, this game has some of the most faithful, yet silly interpretations of real guns that i've seen from games, especially like this, in a long time. most of the guns are real guns, most of which never saw the light of battle, such as the "K&H X20" modeled after the H&K G11K2, which correctly shoots caseless ammunition at rediculous speeds, faithful to how it works in reality. There's the "Precise Industry AS15," a direct reference to the Daewoo Precision Industries USAS-12, a fully automatic 12 gauge shotgun, this one fires flechettes which pierce armor. There's the BN-99, a direct copy of the Russian AN-94, then there's the "Abscess Ironworks Lux ff374f727ce9d6de93be0793733c321," which is inspired (probably) by the absolute density and girth of my weiner, make of that what you will. Then there are guns like the ZKZ Transactional Rifle, which gives you control over how much damage you do depending on how Jeff Bezosy you are. The Zippy 3000 sucks donkey ass, you can fish, explode people into a sh1tty 3d pen sculpture, eat people's brains from a distance, or larp as a cop and beat innocent people to death.

movement implants completely break the speed at which levels can be completed. you can shoot through windows and kill all of the enemies at the start and exit in less than 10 seconds, you can b-hop through levels and beat the enemy's reaction time with pure speed, utterly destroying them with explosive, chemical, and/or biological weapons, about face and boost your way to the exit before the opps can shoot at you. you can drive around, hitting civilians and dogs like my dad when he has too much juice, or crouch your way through the map like a b1tch, plinking enemies with silenced weapons.

you can cover your screen and be near-invincible with the level V biosuit, bounce off the ground and take zero fall damage with the bounce suit, soldier tf2 with the tactical blast shield, be invisible from 20 meters and up with the stealth suit, say fu<k gravity with the abominator, spider-man with the grappendix, make the game impossible with the cursed torch, do 2 jumps with the gunkboosters, do 3 with the funkgrunters, see jesus with the icaros machine, minecraft ice boat race with the microbial oil secretion glands, go fast, go high, go higher, listen to music, heal yourself, put everyone to sleep, put everyone to sleep ;), ignore toxicity, turn into a gmod bouncy-ball, get killed instantly with style, have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ jetpack, shoot around corners, make you blind, give you esp, shoot with your face, mario blue mushroom, make the stock market move faster, punch people to death, see at night, and even marry poppins flowey undertale umbrella your way to the ground.

Now for the cringe part, where I'll use proper punctuation and grammar because I suck. this game has a lot of references to real life sh1t, like Chunkopops, fat nerds that say sh1t that makes no sense, billionaire sex parties, meat cubes, tech moguls, the stock market, the black market organ market, the ever-exciting fish market, and intense references to religions such as Gnosticism, the fake end boss of the game is a direct reference to Abraxas (or Abrasax), the ruler, or "Great Archon" of the heavens, many texts designate Abraxas as "the power above all, and First Principle" and "the cause and first archetype." The face of Abraxas also appears every time you die in the game, staring at you with it's big sexy face. The entire game revolves around dying, how meaningless it is, the game fully acknowledges you dying horribly, and punishes you for it, stripping you of your Divine Link, which can only be obtained through completing a level on "Punishment" difficulty, or finding one in the last main level of the game, but once you're stripped of it, it only charges $500 every time, and if you're on the lowest difficulty, "Power in Misery" (by dying 4+ times on 1 level), it's free. This also means that most likely, everyone you kill is just as easily brought back, if it costed $500 for a lowly grunt to be recombined, the CEO of a big company would also be a no-brainer.

The final goal of the game, after killing every target, finding every world, obtaining the "Hope Eradicated" achievement (which can also be found using the Cursed Torch), going into a secret door in the first level, talking to a guy, unlocking "DEATH" Mode, and killing the CEO of the company you work for, you become the most powerful person ever, but at the cost of your soul. While you didn't have a soul in the first place, at least there was excitement in killing people, you talked to people, went places, used cool guns and gadgets. at the top, you become the very thing you scoffed at and the very people you killed for money. the "real" ending of Cruelty Squad is a shallow one.

BUT BUYING A HOUSE IS WHERE ITS AT. If you kill the 3 desert circle creatures from Mario dancing gayly in the sky, after they shoot lasers at you, you get $1,000,000, a semi-automatic shotgun that shoots as fast as you click (Raymond Shocktroop Tactical), and the CSIJ Level VI Golem Exoskeleton which strips you of your guns, gives you 2x health, and has you beating the sh1t out of everything. If you ignore the test from god of becoming the CEO, you can just replay all the missions, utterly d1cking everything in sight, regardless of size, shooty count, or bullet bigginess.

In other words, buy this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game

one of the deepest and most involved story games I've ever played. the graphics are artfully garbage and the textures, while looking sketch, tie the themes of the game together with the story. the world of cruelty squad is incredibly dark, life is worth nothing due to technological advancements, and your job is to kill people, usually the super rich who betray the wishes of the super rich that pay you. you can surgically install implants that give you certain advantages, usually at the cost of something else, you can find and buy guns that do insane sh1t, and just as easily get killed by the enemies using them. this game has an incredibly high skill ceiling, and for the price, is the best game I think I've ever invested in. You can eat corpses, steal their organs and sell them for money, you can swim to an island and borrow a nice man's fishing rod (or kill him and he never comes back), fishing for money, you can even invest in stocks that update constantly. making you money or losing all of it. while the "hehe silly random" aspect does exist, it accents the themes of the game perfectly and I honestly prefer how over-sized and easily recognizable the icons are. late stage implants and weapons are overpowered as sh1t but that's how the game is supposed to be. you receive direct upgrades above early game enemies. while most games go for a more fair approach to enemy npcs, this game sees them in an RPG way, more as low tier enemies you later d1ck on with late-stage items. [spoilers ahead, review is otherwise complete, if you're reading this before buying, stop here] giant enemies that can seem impossible to kill when you first encounter them seem like mere inconveniences and sometimes helpful assets later, such as the swamp gasser who you can bait to shoot near your target and riot patrol them to death. necromechs can't be killed with bullets, and when you first see them, they terrify the sh1t out of you, but once you get any of the anti-armour rounds, they're just normal enemies that are easier to hit and move slower. shock troopers move fast, and do a lot of damage, but when you get a sniper, rocket launcher, or nailgun, they're minor inconveniences. the nailers from neuron activator will instantly drain your health, but if you see them before they see you, they have the same amount of armor as the security guards in pharmakokinetiks, so you can one-tap them with the default silenced pistol and pick up the best gun in the game. SPEAKING OF GUNS, this game has some of the most faithful, yet silly interpretations of real guns that i've seen from games, especially like this, in a long time. most of the guns are real guns, most of which never saw the light of battle, such as the "K&H X20" modeled after the H&K G11K2, which correctly shoots caseless ammunition at rediculous speeds, faithful to how it works in reality. There's the "Precise Industry AS15," a direct reference to the Daewoo Precision Industries USAS-12, a fully automatic 12 gauge shotgun, this one fires flechettes which pierce armor. There's the BN-99, a direct copy of the Russian AN-94, then there's the "Abscess Ironworks Lux ff374f727ce9d6de93be0793733c321," which is inspired (probably) by the absolute density and girth of my weiner, make of that what you will. Then there are guns like the ZKZ Transactional Rifle, which gives you control over how much damage you do depending on how Jeff Bezosy you are. The Zippy 3000 sucks donkey ass, you can fish, explode people into a sh1tty 3d pen sculpture, eat people's brains from a distance, or larp as a cop and beat innocent people to death. movement implants completely break the speed at which levels can be completed. you can shoot through windows and kill all of the enemies at the start and exit in less than 10 seconds, you can b-hop through levels and beat the enemy's reaction time with pure speed, utterly destroying them with explosive, chemical, and/or biological weapons, about face and boost your way to the exit before the opps can shoot at you. you can drive around, hitting civilians and dogs like my dad when he has too much juice, or crouch your way through the map like a b1tch, plinking enemies with silenced weapons. you can cover your screen and be near-invincible with the level V biosuit, bounce off the ground and take zero fall damage with the bounce suit, soldier tf2 with the tactical blast shield, be invisible from 20 meters and up with the stealth suit, say fu<k gravity with the abominator, spider-man with the grappendix, make the game impossible with the cursed torch, do 2 jumps with the gunkboosters, do 3 with the funkgrunters, see jesus with the icaros machine, minecraft ice boat race with the microbial oil secretion glands, go fast, go high, go higher, listen to music, heal yourself, put everyone to sleep, put everyone to sleep ;), ignore toxicity, turn into a gmod bouncy-ball, get killed instantly with style, have a goddamn jetpack, shoot around corners, make you blind, give you esp, shoot with your face, mario blue mushroom, make the stock market move faster, punch people to death, see at night, and even marry poppins flowey undertale umbrella your way to the ground. Now for the cringe part, where I'll use proper punctuation and grammar because I suck. this game has a lot of references to real life sh1t, like Chunkopops, fat nerds that say sh1t that makes no sense, billionaire sex parties, meat cubes, tech moguls, the stock market, the black market organ market, the ever-exciting fish market, and intense references to religions such as Gnosticism, the fake end boss of the game is a direct reference to Abraxas (or Abrasax), the ruler, or "Great Archon" of the heavens, many texts designate Abraxas as "the power above all, and First Principle" and "the cause and first archetype." The face of Abraxas also appears every time you die in the game, staring at you with it's big sexy face. The entire game revolves around dying, how meaningless it is, the game fully acknowledges you dying horribly, and punishes you for it, stripping you of your Divine Link, which can only be obtained through completing a level on "Punishment" difficulty, or finding one in the last main level of the game, but once you're stripped of it, it only charges $500 every time, and if you're on the lowest difficulty, "Power in Misery" (by dying 4+ times on 1 level), it's free. This also means that most likely, everyone you kill is just as easily brought back, if it costed $500 for a lowly grunt to be recombined, the CEO of a big company would also be a no-brainer. The final goal of the game, after killing every target, finding every world, obtaining the "Hope Eradicated" achievement (which can also be found using the Cursed Torch), going into a secret door in the first level, talking to a guy, unlocking "DEATH" Mode, and killing the CEO of the company you work for, you become the most powerful person ever, but at the cost of your soul. While you didn't have a soul in the first place, at least there was excitement in killing people, you talked to people, went places, used cool guns and gadgets. at the top, you become the very thing you scoffed at and the very people you killed for money. the "real" ending of Cruelty Squad is a shallow one. BUT BUYING A HOUSE IS WHERE ITS AT. If you kill the 3 desert circle creatures from Mario dancing gayly in the sky, after they shoot lasers at you, you get $1,000,000, a semi-automatic shotgun that shoots as fast as you click (Raymond Shocktroop Tactical), and the CSIJ Level VI Golem Exoskeleton which strips you of your guns, gives you 2x health, and has you beating the sh1t out of everything. If you ignore the test from god of becoming the CEO, you can just replay all the missions, utterly d1cking everything in sight, regardless of size, shooty count, or bullet bigginess. In other words, buy this goddamn game