Greed Corp. is a game that looks very familiar, but will surprise you with its gameplay. The hexagonal grids, the tiered battlefields, and the various units that make up the opposing armies all strike a chord immediately for fans of turn-based strategy games. We've played lots of them over the years, and they seem to be experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. Offshoots like tower defense games have also come along and built a fan-base, but Greed Corp. is a bit different than anything we've seen before. As a critique, the camera is often pulled back too far, with no option for zooming in on the action. As you play through Greed Corp., it becomes less of an issue, because you find that key advances in an enemy's forces will be accompanied by either an obvious unit or a specific badge on that player's scoreboard. You can't have more than one player's units occupying a single tile, but we definitely kept reaching for the "zoom" button that wasn't there. Especially when we look at the quality graphics used in the game, it's a shame that one can't see more detail.

Things you can easily see and hear in Greed Corp. show subtle touches that separate this game from where it obviously drew inspiration. The music is unusual, often sounding more like something off the AM radio dial than the usual driving guitar-rock, pseudo martial themes, or brooding techno. The traditional strategy game tends to imbue its units with some character, but we all know listening to the same bland utterance the hundredth time we move a unit gets very old. Greed Corp. paid a lot of attention to its units and their movement animations and sounds. Watching an enemy unit send up a flare upon conquering new territory, listening with anticipation and dread as a Harvester unit roils the earth and sinks one tile deeper, and the crumbling descent of tiles into oblivion, are sights and sounds you'll come to love while playing Greed Corp.. The design aesthetic owes a bit to steampunk, and attempts to avoid overusing the obvious military themes like tanks and jeeps.

The big switcheroo in Greed Corp. is that instead of stockpiling resources as you do in most RTS or turn-based strategy games, your resource production is constantly working against you. This sounds strange, but it goes to the heart of the underlying message in Greed Corp. about environmental responsibility, corporate short-sightedness, and non-renewable resources. Each time you place a Harvester, that unit begins a cycle of harvesting resources once per turn (hence its name) which fuels your production of other units, including new Harvesters. Sounds straightforward enough, right? The twist is that as the Harvester works, it drives the tile it occupies and the surrounding tiles down and erodes them steadily, until they eventually crumble away into the murky void. You also gain minimal resources by occupying tiles, but advancing is a necessity, since staying put in the grids near a Harvester will only lead to your demise.

The strategic implications of this change in gameplay make Greed Corp. something really special for strategy fans. It literally takes a few rounds of play at even the most basic level to get the hang of things, but once you grasp the mechanics, it is one heck of a lot of fun. You build initial units with resources gathered, and increase your force quotient with Armory units. These are good for producing Walker units that can range from tile to tile and capture enemy emplacements, plus the Cannon you can build is great for taking out remote enemy tiles. Eventually you'll be able to purchase a Carrier unit that can transport a full complement of Walkers to some distant tile, but the Carrier and Cannon both have the disadvantage of limited availability. You can play a fast-paced offense, but you may quickly find yourself overextended with the relatively underpowered Walkers. You can alternatively hang back and try to defend your turf, but you'll then find yourself starved for resources and hounded by enemies' Cannon shots or Carrier attacks. The solo campaign spans over 30 missions, and you can drop into Multiplayer with up to three human players, or some combination of human and CPU opponent. The fun increases geometrically when you have more than one human player in the mix, since the CPU tends to take a relatively one dimensional approach during the campaign. The replay value is off the charts, and the many unique twists are enough to make this a must-have for die-hard fans of strategic gameplay.

There are some balance issues in Greed Corp. that we didn't love, but most of the pain here is strictly self-inflicted. The Cannon units seem overpowered, considering they have a minimal build cost and do devastating damage that will eventually destroy a targeted tile. There should have been some reciprocal damage done to the player that fires a Cannon, in keeping with the game's theme. In similar fashion, the Carriers seem expensive at 50 credits, considering they're only good for a one-time transfer of Walkers. A cheaper Carrier, or a more expensive and disposable Carrier would have improved options for players. The initial shock at having to balance resource production with advancing into new territory quickly subsides, and you'll find that many of the stages that look complex become a shooting war too quickly. There's more than one way to win, of course, but Greed Corp. generally rewards a steady, thoughtful style of play rather than an aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach. There aren't multiple levels of difficulty, but each campaign introduces more challenging opponents, and level designs that force you to make hard decisions quickly. The time element is something that you'll either love or hate; at the beginning of your turn, the clock will start counting down. Those accustomed to take-your-time turns will be a bit surprised, but we ultimately came to like the fact that a round of Greed Corp. doesn't stretch on very long at all. You can always come back and replay a level, and you'll frequently have to in the beginning.

Many assumed in the past that the PC was just better suited to strategy gameplay, and this has been frequently proved wrong with the new generation of consoles. Not only are these high-powered consoles well equipped to showcase great graphics, they have a plug-and-play approach to networking that makes online multiplayer a blast. Controls tend to be the rub, but Greed Corp. for Xbox 360 does a fine job translating what would have been a point-and-click mechanic for selecting and building units to the Microsoft controller. As your turn commences, you can navigate freely through the level to the tiles that you own, by moving the camera with the Analog Stick. We found it curious that there wasn't an option to cycle through all units or owned tiles, but the levels aren't so large or so crowded that this is a necessity. It would have been a nice convenience, and it's not like this hasn't been available in tile-based strategy games before... When you select a unit, you simply aim it to a tile you own or want to own, and the shoulder buttons control how many of your multiple units will make the move. This is a handy feature in cases where you've reached the upper limit for Walkers and have 16 of the little suckers clustered in a tile. Moving them one by one would be a nightmare, so being able to group them and migrate them quickly is sure handy. The only other controls you'll need to know are special commands, as in loading and firing the Cannon. There isn't anything in the controls that you'll find annoying, and they become very familiar very quickly.

The most novel thing about Greed Corp. is that it can be novel at all, considering the weight of convention that fills the strategy-game archives. We've been mining resources, stockpiling units, and watching our supply lines for so long that we never thought much about turning the formula on its head. Greed Corp. does this and does it well, changing the rules in a way that will seem fresh to veterans, but that won't alienate anyone with its complexity. Managing units here isn't any more difficult than in other strategy titles, but the overall lack of permanence, topped off by the ticking timer, is what makes Greed Corp. something you'll remember long after the credits roll. Apart from the great things done with design and gameplay, the investment in a backstory that informs the way you actually play the game is what really impressed us. Strategy fans will be thrilled, and this might be a game that pulls people into the genre from unexpected corners. Highly recommended.