Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. Review

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (which I’ll never write this way again) is one of the weirder games for the 3DS. I was actively looking forward to it, and then Nintendo delayed it for no foreseeable reason. Surely a game of this calibre – a new meld of action and strategy from the studio who brought my Fire Emblem – must be good? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, quite frankly, and one that people are going to either love or hate. There simply isn’t much of a middle ground when it comes to Code Name: STEAM.

Code Name: STEAM takes place in what can only be described as an alternate dimension, where steam powered machinations were more prevalent than anything else and he president of the United States runs an elite squadron of agents. You play as Henry Fleming, a soldier who partners up with John Henry to protect Victoria-era London from an impending Cthulu-esque Alien invasion. Failing their plans, the pair are recruited by the president, Abraham Lincoln, into STEAM. STEAM are a strike team designed to work against the alien menace – of which their acronym spells Strike Team Eliminating the Alien Menace. It’s cheesy and it doesn’t quite make sense.

In fact the storyline of Code Name: STEAM is generally pretty lacklustre. The characters are vacuous, the plot is wooden and the overall presentation feels pretty subdued. This sounds bizarre, given how over the top and unique the game’s presentation appears to be, but it’s a dying shame that none of it feels like it’s properly capitalised on.

The gameplay itself is fairly typical to any Intelligent Systems game. Every level is divided into a grid and usually features a few layers here or there. Your playable characters carry a steam device with them that can be used to either move or use items or weapons. The games does attempt to make things a little bit more interesting by offering trade-offs between using your steam and saving it. If you’re smart enough to build up your steam rather than expend it on your turn, you can enter a special stance where you’ll automatically attack enemies within your field of view.

Every character has a main weapon and a sub-weapon, although you’ll find more pieces of weaponry as you progress through the main game. Every character also has a special ability, which usually can mean the difference between winning and losing a battle. The special abilities are excessively powerful, but they come with one caveat – they can only be used once per battle. Of course, this means you’ll have to plan when and where to use the abilities as the action unfolds.

At first, there seemed to be more of an emphasis on taking down enemies, but as we played more it became more obvious that the goal of the game was to get to the exit of the level. You can hang around, but it looks like Code Name: STEAM was happy to just endlessly spawn enemies in regardless, so it seems pointless. There are upgrades to collect on each stage too, but given the cost to retrieve them it’s almost always hard to decide whether it’s truly worth it or not.

But truly the game’s biggest misstep is just how at odds it is with itself. It’s a game that, via the steam mechanic, requires players to really plan your movements. But it doesn’t provide the tools necessary to do so. There’s no map. There’s no overhead view. There’s absolutely nothing. You’ve got the four team members’ field of views but that’s it. It’s a very baffling design choice given the games insistence that you plan out your approach to each mission and, in more complex levels, leads to circumstances where you’re just wandering around and wasting time.

Code Name: STEAM’s unwillingness to show the player anything really adds to the tedium of it all too. When your enemy is moving, the action is essentially paused as you wait for these moves to play out. So, sometimes, you’re literally just staring into blank space waiting for your character to have their turn again. Sometimes you’ll see an enemy attack one of your characters, but it’s just, well, boring. Imagine watching the CPU take its turn on Mario Party, except less visually exciting and on a handheld. It’s a weird design choice and a time consuming one that betrays the fundamental design of a handheld title. There’s just too much downtime between turns in Code Name: STEAM.

And it’s this tedium and repetition that melds with the game’s rather unforgiving difficulty level that makes it just not fun to play. Granted, the game does get slightly easier as you play through and attain more abilities, upgrades and even characters. But it’s still poorly balanced between legitimate challenge and fair difficulty.

But those of you who might enjoy this exercise in tedium will probably be happy to know there’s quite a lot of content in the game. All in all, players who are looking to rush through the story mode will easily get at least twenty or so hours out of it. It’s just an interesting question to ask just how much of that is repetitious enemy watching.

In terms of presentation, the game looks reasonably better in motion than it does in screenshots but still feels rather rough. Visuals are fantastically stylised, making up for the technical shortcomings of the 3DS, but that’s really about it. The game is fully voiced and features some sci-fi veterans too – both Wil Wheaton and Michael Dorn are voicing characters here as well as the somewhat controversial Adam Baldwin. The voice work, despite the storyline, is pretty well executed and helps bring the characters to life beyond what text boxes could do.