Recruits

I want to love Recruits, and I genuinely tried. The pitch is right in my wheelhouse: a squad-based top-down shooter with permadeath, soldier progression, and co-op support, clearly drawn from the same spiritual lineage as Cannon Fodder and Alien Swarm. Watching your little troops gain ranks, earn medals, and accumulate nicknames before being cut down in a hail of bullets is the kind of attachment loop I find quietly compelling. For a small studio swinging at that particular target, the ambition was real. The trouble is that Recruits entered Steam Early Access in mid-2014 and, by every available signal, never meaningfully left that alpha state. Developer communication went quiet, updates dried up, and the Steam page now carries a warning that the developer has not communicated any updates for over a year. The Steam review score sits at a very negative 19% positive from 61 reviews. That number is not just a data point, it is a pattern: players who bought in expecting a trajectory toward a finished game were left holding an unpolished alpha with bugs that were never patched out. The core loop, moving a squad through mission objectives ranging from enemy elimination to covert operations and survival scenarios, works well enough in short bursts. The right-click squad command menu in singleplayer shows that someone understood how this genre should feel. But rough edges everywhere, from AI behavior to mission structure, make it hard to trust what you are playing. The permadeath system, where soldiers lost in the field are gone for good, is genuinely the most interesting design choice here. Losing a high-rank soldier who you have equipped and named stings in exactly the way the genre asks it to. The commander-level respect system, which unlocks airstrikes and cluster bombs as earned abilities rather than starting tools, adds a light but meaningful reward curve. Co-op and local co-op support exist on paper and may delight a very specific pair of players who know what they are getting. These ideas, taken together, sketch a game worth finishing. They were just never finished. I will defend a slow or rough opening when a game earns the patience it asks for. Recruits never earns it, because the path from early alpha to completed product was abandoned. Buying it now means buying a 2014 alpha snapshot, frozen in time, with no realistic expectation of future work. If the concept of a Cannon Fodder-style permadeath squad shooter genuinely calls to you, your time is better spent with something that actually shipped. This one carries the ghost of a good idea, and that is genuinely sad to say.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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