Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (3DS) Review
Date Released: 13 March 2015
Date Played: 20 December 2021
Introduction:
Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. was a commercial failure that received very mixed reviews when it arrived on store shelves back in 2015. Developed by Intelligent Systems, the renowned developers of the Fire Emblem and Paper Mario franchises, many people were excited for this release when it was first announced and seemed more than ready for a little tactical shooting action. Once people got their hands on it, however, the community was greatly divided. Everyone either seemed love it or hate it with not many falling in between. With lots of 3/10 reviews and lots of 9/10 reviews, this left the overall ranking of the game somewhere in the mediocre range when all averaged together. Without a known franchise tie in or license to bolster its sales, it wasn't long until you saw piles of this game stacked up in the bargain bin for $5. Even now, 6 years later, this game can be had for around that same price brand new.
So, is this game a misunderstood masterpiece that was just beyond the grasp of your average casual handheld gamer? Or, was is a S.T.E.A.M.ing pile of garbage that revealed the hubris of Intelligent Systems and Nintendo? Let me put it this way, I bought this game brand new for $1 and not only do I not feel like I got my money's worth, I feel like Nintendo OWES me money after playing this mess of a game.
Story:
The premise of this game is so bizarre and unhinged that it's hard to know where to begin. Essentially, Abraham Lincoln faked his own death to escape from the public eye so he could form a secret combat force known as S.T.E.A.M. to, as I quote, "fight the real enemy." Never mind slavery and its abolishment, a nation divided by war and trying to heal, nor a general powder keg of political differences threatening to cast the re-United States back into turmoil. No, according to this game, none of that was the real problem. The REAL problem was... ALIENS. That whole presidency thing was just a temporary cover to create this, "Strike Team Eliminating the Alien Menace (aka. S.T.E.A.M). This whole premise is so tasteless and out of touch that I'm almost at a loss for words. I can't believe that Nintendo took a real historical figure who was literally killed for their beliefs and trying to make humanity a better place by liberating millions of enslaved people and turned them into a caricature for an easy "cool" factor. I can picture the developers in my mind sitting around a conference table and someone says, "We need an American that everyone likes to be the focus of our game." Someone replied, "What about Abraham Lincoln?" Then, no thought was given to Lincoln's actual personality or attributes, they slapped a beard and a mole on a generic steampunk character and called it a day. What's next, saying Martin Luther King Jr. faked the whole Civil Rights Movement and his own assassination as giant distraction so he could secretly create a team of fighters to eliminate the bug monsters living below Atlanta, Georgia? Offensive.
Anyway, Queen Victoria (yes, that Queen Victoria) has had Buckingham Palace invaded by the aliens and Henry Fleming (from Joseph Conrad's the Red Badge of Courage), John Henry, the cast from the Wizard of Oz, and some other randomly selected literary characters that have nothing to do with each other join S.T.E.A.M. to go fight against the alien menace. It's an incredibly random premise and it really does feel like the developers were just drawing ideas out of a hat.
I'm sure there are some people out there who really dig this crazy idea for a game, but I find the game's lack of propriety off putting and its general world building (outside of its characters) rather banal and pedestrian. You can't take a storyline as overused as an alien invasion, inject a bunch of random characters that everyone knows, give them all stereotypical personalities that have nothing to do with the way the actual characters behaved themselves, and call it "original".
Gameplay:
The gameplay is a tactical combat game like the developer's previous Fire Emblem games combined with a 3rd person view like Valkyria Chronicles (which really just makes it a ripoff of Valkyria Chronicles since that was a tactical combat game itself). Your team is put onto a map with an objective (like reach point A, or escort person B, etc.) with a group of enemies between them and their goal. You able to move around on a grid system and fire your weapons. This is done in 3rd person view with a targeting reticule. Each action uses "steam" which acts as action points. Just like all of the games in this style, you try to move into position and outflank your enemy while using your action points wisely to eliminate them. The different characters have different weapons and abilities that sets them apart and just like always, picking the correct team for the job is essential. If you conserve enough steam on your turn, it will put that character into overwatch and any enemy that crosses them will get blasted. Using this technique is an important mechanic and the game feels impossible without utilizing this. It doesn't feel much different than the aforementioned Valkyria Chronicles and comes across more of a bad clone of that game rather than a progression of Intelligent System's other games.
After all of your characters take their turn, the enemy gets to go. And this is where the game takes a giant nosedive right off the cliff in terms of gameplay. The game makes you sit through every single enemy action as they slowly happen. You can't fast forward, you can't skip. You can't even see what the enemy is doing unless one of your team members has line of sight on them (which isn't very often). Much of the time, you'll just be staring at a wall while the computer moves the enemy around somewhere in the distance. This can take almost two minutes sometimes. It's absurd, and I've never seen a worse game design choice in my life. Pretty much half of your playtime is just sitting there waiting on the enemy turn while not knowing what they're doing or where they are. It's totally pointless for the developers to have included this and it shows a blatant disregard for the gamer's time. These parts are so long and so boring that I almost fell asleep during several battles. Truthfully, it feels like they didn't even playtest this game before releasing it because no on in their right mind would have thought the omission of a fast forward option during these sections was reasonable.
On top of that, there is no in-game map. You can't see where you're going, you can't see where you are, you don't know where the enemies are located or how many there are remaining, and you can't get a grasp of the overall area that you're supposed to tactically overcome. It pretty much makes the game unplayable. Remember how I said that using your overwatch was essential to succeeding in the game? Well, the enemies have this ability too. Since there's no map, and no way to know where the enemies are, you'll often walk around a corner and there will just be an enemy there sitting in overwatch who will blast you in the face. Then, you try to back up and get out of line of sight, and they see you move and blast you again. Basically, you're constantly walking into traps with no way to know they're there and once you get into those situations, there's rarely away to get out without taking massive damage. It's extremely frustrating and rage inducing to say the least.
I found a good method for avoiding this was to just go super slowly and rely almost exclusively on your overwatch to carry you through. Unfortunately, the game pretty much spits out enemy reinforcements from behind you constantly. So, you're almost always being pincered from two directions which forces you to have to constantly move your squad forward. This of course is not always tactically advantageous and often forces you into the enemies lying in waiting and feels unfair and cheap. Also, in some levels you'll just start off being surrounded by several enemies from above that can jump down on you, fire at you, and drop grenades on several of your soldiers at once and you have no way of reaching them or targeting them. You have to push through the hail of bullets and attacks over several turns while taking tons of damage just to get into a position to fire on the enemy. I understand that this happens in these sorts of games on certain maps and various scenarios. But, it seems like a common occurrence in this game and makes the battles themselves feel like they weren't well thought out. Rather than clearing out enemies along the way as you push towards your goal, this game feels like enemies constantly pour out from all directions around you while you try to survive long enough to make it to the objective. You'll constantly feel outnumbered, outgunned, and intentionally put into a losing position.
This game is hard, unforgiving, and it feels unfair a lot of the time. Even when you line up a shot on the enemy's weak point, often times their standing animation will make them bob out of the way and have your bullet miss. Imagine you have a section in a game where you have to take out an enemy with a sniper rifle, but the entire time the enemy just keeps swaying back and forth. You fire your shot right when his head is in the crosshairs, and once the bullet is in the air, he sways out of the way causing you to miss. Every enemy in the game feels like they do this all of the time. This is just another in a long line of poor design choices.
Personally, even when I felt like had a good handle on the battles and was making good progress, I just wasn't having any fun. The little bit of enjoyment I was starting to experience was completely quelled by spending half of my time just waiting on the enemy's turn or trying to hunker down and clear out some enemies blocking my way while reinforcement after reinforcement kept appearing from behind me. I finally called it quits when I spent an hour trying to fight my way through a section over and over during several attempts. I finally got to a spot with some cover, and the game decided to spawn 3 new enemies behind me. I'd use all of my steam to take them out. Then, they'd spawn 3 more on the next turn, rinse and repeat. It was demoralizing.
The game does give you save points, healing items, and powerful special attacks (that can only be used once per battle) to help you out during a mission. But, they honestly feel like they were put in there to help make the game more forgiving in terms of difficulty rather than balancing out the scenarios themselves. Why carefully plan out enemy placement that forces the use of good tactics; when, instead, you can just throw a bunch of overpowered enemies randomly around the map and give the player a bunch of healing items and save points and let them clumsily work their way through it?
Presentation:
Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. is an ugly game with a bad art style. It presents itself in a comic book setting with mostly still frame animation surrounded by panels. Often, the poorly voice acted characters will give exposition about what they are doing and you'll see an image of them with a sound bubble that says, "wham" or "bang" a la the 1960s Batman TV show. Ugh. The cell-shaded graphics, which are normally pretty forgiving, don't work well here and give the blocky and clunky character models and even more unappealing look. The alien enemies are uninspired and very generic looking and are all too similar to each other. If they didn't tell you the name of the enemy when you targeted it, I don't think I would have been able to tell the enemies apart whatsoever. Everything is just a purple scorpion-like insectoid. The lack of enthusiasm for creating interesting enemies to fight on part of the developers is appalling in this game.
The music is good enough and ranges from some rock tracks to some basic EDM stylings. It does serve to keep the action up as much as it can, but it's not memorable in any way and fades into the background of the presentation... and your mind far too easily.
As for the voice acting. It's so very bad and hammed up. The characters all deliver their lines like they are playing old fashioned comic book characters... because that's what they're are. But, I can only hear John Henry say, "Now, that's a whole lot of ugly." every time he sees an alien before I begin to lose my mind. I know that this is exactly what the developers were going for, but it's not what I want. I'm tired of it. Similar to how the dialog from anime can become a cringeworthy trope, the over confident action hero dialog doesn't fare any better.
Conclusion:
Code Name S.T.E.A.M. is a painfully bad game that loves to waste your time. It took a fun and engaging gameplay genre and made it boring and tedious. You spend half your time not doing anything and the other half of your time trying out half-baked strategies because you can't truly plan anything due to the game's lack of a map. The premise of the game is very cliché and overused with the alien invasion idea. They tried to spice things up by using what they considered to be whimsical and zany characters, but this only comes off as not only lazy, but actually severely lacking in decorum in the case of Lincoln. The cell-shaded comic book steampunk aesthetic is so incredibly overused and phoned in that it feels like the art direction of this game was created by a focus group of 9 year old boys trying to act cool. There is nothing likable or redeemable about this game and the only positive I have to say is that the game is technically functional. It's didn't crash, and I didn't encounter any bugs (excluding the alien character models) while I was playing.
I paid $1 for this game, and it was a gigantic ripoff.
Final Status: Played (couldn't force myself to continue)
Final Score: 3/10 (Painfully bad.)
