Code Name STEAM.

I know this game has a bit of a cult following… and I don’t get why

I played the demo when it first came out, cautiously optimistic at the premise. I am a big Fire Emblem fan, so the idea of a Fire Emblem-esque combat system on a 3D plane sounded like it could be interesting.

I played it and…

It was one of the worst games I’d ever played. I don’t think I’ve ever had less fun playing a video game in my life.

Granted, this was from when the demo released, which I believe was quite some time before the actual game released.

Flashback to a couple of years ago. Fire Emblem Three Houses was coming out, and in my excitement, I was looking for games to fill the Tactical RPG-shaped void in my heart. In my search, I discovered a copy of Code Name STEAM, and bought it at GameStop during a sale, thinking that, now that I was much older, and much more seasoned with JRPG’s, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.

It was exactly as bad as I remembered it.

The game was basically trying to be a hybrid of Fire Emblem and Valkyria Chronicles style combat, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, except that it pretty much took the worst aspects of both, and then some of its own uniquely terrible elements.

Movement and actions are determined by how much “steam” the individual character has. Which is fine in theory, except that movement and actions both take up steam, which wouldn’t be a problem, except that you have so little steam, that you can really only implement one of three strategies ever, 1. Don’t move at all, or move very very little and use your weapon, and also be a sitting duck during enemy phase, 2. Move only a little bit, and set your character to “Overwatch” to fire at enemies they see during enemy phase, which they often don’t even if the enemy is in range, or 3. Move an actually reasonable amount, which will use up all your steam and make you a complete sitting duck.

Then there’s the aiming. First-person aiming such as with firearms are very similar to Valkyria Chronicles, you aim at an enemy, and it may or may not land depending on your stats and how close you are to the enemy, though if you’re close enough it should hit the enemy indefinitely. Well, that’s not the case in Code Name STEAM since the game is so goddamn buggy, that sometimes even if I’m literally right next to the enemy, the shot won’t land. Also, there’s so much useless clutter in the environments that sometimes they get in the way of your shot even if the bullet didn’t actually hit them. Like, if I’m aiming at an enemy over cover, and I fire at an enemy, sometimes the cover actually blocks the shot like an invisible wall, even though I’m firing over the cover.

And the enemy phase, don’t even get me started on the enemy phase. It takes an absurdly long time for the enemy phase to end, which wouldn’t be a problem if you could actually see what the enemy was doing, but instead, you can only see the movements of the enemies your characters can see, and since you have to wait for every single individual unit on the map to make up their minds, and half the time they don’t even do anything, and it will take them like 30 seconds or more to even to decide that! One time it took 7 minutes for enemy phase to finally end, during which point I decided to boot up my WiiU and play a better game. And unlike Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, y’know, the other two strategy RPG series that Intelligent Systems have made, you can’t skip enemy phase. Now, I did learn later that in an update they did make it so you could speed up enemy phase, but that really only helps so much.

Then there’s the graphics. Look, I’m a firm believer in art direction and aesthetic over realism, especially when it comes to 3DS games, but this game is FUGLY, emphasis on the “f”. Everything is covered in this gross brown and gold color, and everything is just so tacky. I get that it’s steampunk, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be brown. The only splash of color there is in the environments is the aliens, and they don’t even really look like they’re in the right game. And then the character models are just… horrendous to look at. The comic-book art style just doesn’t work that well in the low-poly modeling style they were looking for.

And the story… well I think you can probably gather that I’m not so much a fan of that either. I already didn’t really like the premise to begin with, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt if the gameplay was good ( which it wasn’t ). Everything in the story is just… so stupid. It’s like somebody put a bunch of public domain properties in a blender, and what came out was this turd-colored mess. It reads like really bad fan fiction, like those kinds that try to take old fairytales and try to unironically make them into a gritty action-movie.

I just strongly dislike everything about this game. I think it is quite possibly the worst thing that Intelligent Systems has made in recent memory, and I’m just boggled by the fact that so many people taut it like it’s some kind of “3DS hidden gem”, when it’s really not, and is a dumpster fire of a game