InfiniteCorp review
It's a weird time to be reviewing games, especially when one such game asks you to preserve the social order of a dystopian society in order to turn a profit. InfiniteCorp is a Reigns-like game set in the far-flung future where your goal is to please shareholders while balancing your image with the media, elites, and the working class, among others. The only problem is the game doesn't really care what you think. It only rewards you for making money and avoiding too much criticism, making for a pretty cut-and-dry experience that doesn't make you feel particularly good about playing it.
Digital decision-making
In InfiniteCorp, you play as a manager of a megacorporation and need to make key decisions around the future of the company. Some of these decisions are around resolving issues like recovering stolen goods, while at others are more routine dilemmas around staff management, public relations, etc.
All of these scenarios present themselves as little cards on your screen that you can swipe either to the left or the right, with the direction determining your response. Most of the time, a swipe to the right indicates an affirmative while a swipe to the left does the opposite. Just like Reigns, though, you don't ever have to guess: InfiniteCorp displays some text cards as you move them one way or the other, so you can preview both responses before settling on a direction.
Cybernetic enhancements
Every choice you make in InfiniteCorp has consequences, and you follow them in real time at the top of your screen. Just above the cards you're swiping are four meters (representing elites, citizens, media, security, and syndicate, respectively) that fill up and drain depending on the decisions you make. In addition to keeping all of these groups happy, you also have to worry about your bottom line, which is represented by a meter in the top left corner of the screen.
When you first start playing InfiniteCorp, balancing these things feels like guesswork. Even though you can intuit how certain choices might influence your various meters, it's always hard to say by how much, and there are also times when the game doesn't quite respond in the way you expect. Luckily, the game offers the ability for your to enhance your character with items or even literal body modifications that can do things like provide insight into decisions before you make them or even save you if you fail to satisfy a specific group. Some of these mods can also come with you between rounds so you don't have to worry about re-earning them each time you start a new game.
Corp cronie
The light persistence between runs in InfiniteCorp definitely feels like an improvement to the Reigns formula, but sadly the rest of the game fails to deliver a coherent and satisfying experience. Although the game has a stylish cyberpunk aesthetic (not too unlike Invisible Inc.), the game doesn't seem to use this for anything more than set dressing.
What's worse is that InfiniteCorp doesn't weave together any sort of overarching narrative or give you any sense of agency in this broken world. You're presented with scenarios that gesture at things like class warfare, transhumanism, and other real problems that this genre routinely examines critically, but it never wants you to really engage with any of it. Success simply looks like reading and reacting to each card in an effort to keep everyone happy while turning a profit. As a result, playing InfiniteCorp well makes you feel like a cog in a terrible, dystopian machine.
The bottom line
InfiniteCorp demonstrates that there is still some opportunity to build off of the basic gameplay Reigns pioneered back in 2016, but beyond that it's not very enjoyable. Part of this has to do with how purely mechanical the game feels, but its cyberpunk aesthetic exacerbates things. In addition to using cold logic to succeed, InfiniteCorp rewards you by upholding the status quo of a world gone horribly wrong, which is not the kind of thing I want to play, especially right now.
