Forbes Corporate Warrior

The Good
I don't know what to do with this. Content-wise it's rushed, half-assed, and seems like an alpha proof of concept that was mistakenly released as a game somehow. But the lavish background art suggests that it was actually made with a bit of money.

The best thing about this game is the concept it has, or rather the concept it CLAIMS it has (this is lame FPS city, so don't get excited by whatever's on the box). In the future, corporations will abandon Wall Street, and instead fight each other in a Matrix-esque computer simulation. As a start-up entrepreneur, you must jack in to the simulation, and fight your way to the top according to the laws (laid out in 1843 by Santa Claus, revised in 1964 by Coca Cola) of laissez-faire capitalism. Only now, it's like playing a computer game!

Basically, the game is a finance-themed first-person shooter. The "enemies" are rival corporations seeking to steal your profits, the "weapons" are things like the Ad Blaster and the Takeover Torpedo, there are "power-ups" that give you additional market share. It's gimmicky but cute.

The game mostly abandons this premise half-finished and becomes Doom clone #324235897, but there's still some hints of what it could have been. The shooting sequences aren't really action-based, instead you lock on to rival corporations and steal their customers until they are forced to declare bankruptcy. You do this using weapons appropriate to either "High Quality Goods" or "Bargain-Cheap Prices", depending on what your opponent's customers want (all this data is displayed in the game's HUD). So if your opponent is selling boutique products but his customers want cheap goods, you can cut the legs from under him with some Price Slicer missiles. The more corporations you defeat, the stronger you become (as their customers join you).

In this game, money represents health. Every time you move, it costs money, and fighting also drains your bank account (although you can expect to earn big bucks if you successfully liquidate a rival). You also have to watch out for things like your quarterly stock prices, which will cause you to lose the game if they get too low.

There are some pretty graphics here and there. I liked the loading screen that displays your office in between levels. When you start out you're working in a dingy shoe box apartment, and as you get richer you're lazing around on the beach ...I suggest you enjoy it BECAUSE THIS IS THE ONLY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF PROGRESS YOU GET.

Man, I totally have to stop bashing games in the "good" section.

The Bad
You'll be bored of Forbes: Corporate Warrior in five minutes. Seriously. Buy an egg timer or something.

There's just no game here. You move up to an enemy, attack them, adjust the price/quality sliders to whatever will grant you victory, rinse, and repeat. All enemies behave the same, there's no variety to any of the game's battles. Strategy is nonexistent. You're either strong enough to liquidate an enemy or you're not.

The game basically fails to live up to its promise, which is to be a hybrid financial simulator/FPS. Hell, it fails to be an adequate game of any genre, but that's not the point. Any pretense at being a financial simulator is blown out of the water by the blatantly simple and childish gameplay. This is REALLY crappy Doom, just with all the weapons and enemies renamed to random financial/business buzzwords.

Although the concept art between levels is beautiful, the actual in-game graphics have all the appeal of a 3D wire frame demo circa 1986. This game looks awful. There's no way around it. The whole game appears to take place on a poorly-textured chessboard, with hideous backgrounds and crappy animation. The enemies are weird looking geometric shapes.

And on a minor note, the HUD is a bit too informative, in that it seemingly covers a good 60% of the screen with buttons, menus, and numbers. Obtrusive HUDs are the scourge of old-school FPS games, and especially this one. I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME, YOU JERKS, not have to look past some huge cumbersome user interface.

The Bottom Line
Don't play, seek out, or even think about this game. Forbes: Corporate Warrior richly deserves every sale it didn't get.