Cruelty Squad didn't click with me, not because of its grinning antagonism or brain grating lofi, but because I didn’t find it all that interesting. I’m sort of rooting for it, still, thumbing its leprous nose-cavity at inexplicable Steam bestsellers that won’t be out for six months.
Still, I signed up to have awful soup, made from Clippy’s wire entrails and melted immersive sim floppy disks, spooned on my eyeballs. What I got was a reasonably tense shooter with some extensively labyrinthine level design and, to be fair, a very good shotgun.
Cruelty Squad has the aesthetic of early to mid '90s first-person shooters. No, not Doom and Quake. I'm talking about the trash you don't remember. The hyper-violence, the purple lighting, the repeating textures, the art assets rendered at wildly variable resolutions, the faintly cyberpunk themes.
It's out now on Steam and there's a sensorally aggressive trailer below.