Company of Crime

I keep a mental shortlist of tactical games that try something structurally different from the XCOM template, and Company of Crime earns a spot on that list almost purely on the strength of one decision: strip out the guns and build the whole combat layer around melee positioning. That is a genuinely unusual call for this genre, and it produces moments that feel unlike anything you get from a cover-and-overwatch loop. The two-layer structure will feel familiar. On the strategic map you manage a criminal operation district by district across 1960s London, extorting shopkeepers, acquiring fronts for passive income, recruiting crew from a roster of classes including bouncers, brains, smugglers, and torturers, and watching a heat meter that punishes aggression and rewards patience. The police campaign mirrors this in reverse: you assign sergeants to gather intel, cultivate informants, and apply for warrants before raiding criminal locations. Neither strategic layer is deep by grand-strategy standards. The resource loops are thin, the decision nodes are limited, and the in-game time cost of basic overhead actions is oddly inflated. But the scaffolding is functional, and for a tactics player who primarily cares about getting into missions, it does the job. Where the game genuinely surprises is in the tactical layer. Zone of control mechanics mean facing direction matters on every tile. Entering a character's control zone locks you into melee range, and moving away costs a free attack from the holder. Kicks reposition enemies and open corridors. Throws, submissions, and even improvised weapons like chairs and bottles turn cramped pub backrooms into layered spatial puzzles. The class differences are narrower than they should be, and reviewers across the board noted that fights tend to blur into stamina races rather than cleanly differentiated tactical problems as the campaign progresses. The auto-suggest movement system was also flagged at launch as a frequent source of misclicks in a game where positioning is everything. These are real problems, not cosmetic ones. The studio's first-game roughness shows consistently. AI quality is the most cited flaw: enemies do not pressure the positioning system the way a well-tuned tactical AI should, which collapses the threat model and makes the heat mechanic do most of the strategic heavy lifting by default. The story, split between the Clearwater twins on the criminal side and inspector Graham Brooks on the police side, lands closer to a framing device than a proper narrative. Steam's all-time user score sits in Mixed territory, and a Metacritic score of 66 reflects the critical consensus that the core idea is sound but the execution needed more time. What saves the experience from being a write-off is the presentation. The art direction is cartoony without being dismissive of the period, the 1960s London soundtrack carries genuine atmosphere, and the dark-comedy tone keeps the whole thing from taking itself too seriously. For a newcomer to the XCOM-style format, the lower tactical ceiling is actually a lower barrier to entry, and the two campaign structure gives you two roughly twenty-hour runs with different strategic priorities. Bottom line for where I sit: this is a sub-tier-5 purchase, meaning you should only pick it up at a significant discount. At that price, if a melee-first tactical brawler set in Swinging Sixties London sounds like it was designed for you, it probably was.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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