Conglomerate 451 looks a bit like a futuristic Legend of Grimrock: its turn-based combat and grid-based movement is classic dungeon crawling RPG fare, but it's set in a cyberpunk world full of evil corporations and state-sanctioned killing. Developer RuneHeads this week announced that it's coming to Early Access in just four days—on May 23.

As the CEO of a government-backed Special Agency, it's your job to clean up Sector 451, which is riddled with crime and corruption. To do that, you create an army of clones, customise them to your liking with weapons, armor and cybernetic implants, and then go and murder everything in site. When they die, they're gone for good, a la XCOM.

Dungeons are procedurally-generated, and the Early Access version will have one of the four planned districts. RuneHeads says it'll be in Early Access for between six and eight months, and during that time it'll get up to six times bigger. That's a lot of growth in a short space of time, but let's see how they get on—we'll know early how quickly it's improving because the devs plan to release two updates a month.

Away from combat, you'll be managing a base and researching new tech to upgrade your super soldiers. When the game releases, the plan is to have 10 character classes, more than 100 skills and more than 30 cyber implants that can help your clones fill a particular role. Perks, mutations, and diplomacy will be in the final game, but aren't in the Early Access version. 

I'm interested to see how RuneHeads handle the story and themes: the devs say it's pulpy, but the thought of sending government-backed clones to wipe out areas of a city certainly sounds pretty heavy (Andy has more to say about that here).

If you want to check it out, the Steam page is here. It doesn't yet have a price listed, but RuneHeads says whatever it costs will likely increase as it nears full release. You can check out the combat in the trailer at the top of this post.

Thanks, RPS.

Conglomerate 451 is a first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler with an unusual twist: Instead of locking players into a fantasy-style swords-and-sorcery maze, it takes place in a futuristic cyberpunk world. It features roguelike elements, including randomized dungeons and missions, and character permadeath. And the Ghost Class battle clones sent by a shadowy government agency to crack down on sector 451 of Conglomerate City are actually the "good" guys who are doing your bidding. 

Mechanically, Conglomerate 451 sounds interesting, with turn-based combat on a grid, skills and powers that are unlocked through research, cyberspace hacking, and a "pain and trauma" system that can leave agents permanently affected by the injuries they take in battle. That—and the ever-present threat of the permanent loss of agents who get offed in the field—puts a premium on strategic use of skills and abilities. 

But the setting and story are a little off-putting. To be fair to 1C Entertainment and developer RuneHeads, sector 451 is apparently a pretty bad place, riddled with crime and corporate corruption. Even so, and without the slightest exaggeration, I got halfway through the trailer before I realized that I would not be fighting these government-controlled extrajudicial murderbots, but commanding them. And it makes no bones about what exactly that means, from the "Restore order at any cost" tagline—boldface theirs—to the visible mission briefing that's literally "kill 'em all." Choosing to set the game in sector 451 is a little on the nose, too. 

It's possible to see an element of Syndicate in all this, and in fact there's a brief bit in the trailer that's basically a straight lift from the original Syndicate intro. But that game is about corporate warfare, and you expect corporations to be evil—they are, after all. I would generally expect better (or at least less overt) behavior from government, but the Steam listing makes it clear that the good governance ship has sailed.

"You are the CEO of a Special Agency, instructed by the Senate of Conglomerate City to restore the order in sector 451, where corrupted corporations have established their turfs," it says. "Thanks to the last constitutional decree, you are allowed to create human clones. Build your own team, manipulate DNA, train your agents, equip them with high-end weapons, choose what cyberlimbs to implant, and send the squad to the field with only one goal: eradicate crime and restore order at any cost." 

Maybe I'm reading too much into all of this. The developer downplayed the state-sanctioned murder thing, saying that the story "will be more akin to pulp fiction in that the plot will serve more as a means of getting you into the game’s RPG meat," while the clones are actually created from agents who are killed in battle. I'm not sure how that materially impacts the whole "I am a tool of the oppressor" angle, but such things will no doubt become clearer as it comes closer to release. Conglomerate 451 is "coming soon" to Steam Early Access.