Your planet is dying. Huge corporations have sucked the natural resources away, and they exterminate anyone, or anything, that gets in their way. Your mission, obviously, is to fight off these corporations before it’s too late. And trust me, destroying an entire planet has never been this fun.

First off, this awesome new take on the strategy genre completely eliminates that “sit-and-accumulate-resources-then-kill-everything” style of game-play. The maps are made up of hexagonal tiles of varying heights, “Honeycomb” style if you will. The object of the game is to gather resources, build armies of walkers, cannons, and cargo planes to eliminate the huge companies that are destroying the landscape. What makes this game stand apart though, is each time your Harvesters gather resources at the beginning of your turn, the surrounding tiles lose one measure of height. Once the tiles reach a certain level, they break apart, and fall away. You will lose every asset you have placed on that tile, and will have to re-build to keep gathering resources to fund your righteous army.

The graphics are great, with a decidedly tasteful Steam Punk vibe. The other bothersome aspects of strategy games like health and damage points are all eliminated in this game as well. It’s very simple. You build 10 walkers. If you attack 8 walkers, you have 2 walkers left. Cannon shots eliminate 5 walkers per shot. It’s a simple matter of subtraction, really. Even first-time strategy game players will find this game easy to play and control, right off the bat. The single player campaign consists of a tutorial level, and seven regular mission maps. Again, player controlled territory or “tiles” can be harvested from, but will eventually be destroyed. So camping, and loading up on resources won’t work. You constantly have to be on the move, capturing new tiles, and destroying enemies. Your actions can change the landscape too, however. Cannon blasts to already weakened tiles can collapse them, or even cause a chain reaction of adjacent weak tiles to collapse. You can really put the hurt on your enemies with a well-placed cannon blast. Also, Once you gather enough resources, you can build a cargo plane type aircraft that enables you to move your walkers to the unreachable tiles if too many tiles have collapsed for you to move there normally.

As you progress through the missions, you first fight only one enemy team at a time, then eventually multiple teams at once, until you have 4 teams on each map, and you must remain victorious over all of them to win the level. Greed Corp is a fantastic game for fans of the genre, and first-timers will love it too. It’s easy to play, but still challenging, and the production values are high. Of all the recent releases in the Xbox Live Arcade, Greed Corp is easily in the top three. My advice, buy this game and play the heck out of it. It’s a blast. It’s available on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]