State of Anarchy

Grand Theft Auto 2 is the comparison everyone reaches for the second they see that overhead camera, and since I usually judge a game by how many spreadsheet columns it deserves, let me mark the difference that matters up front: State of Anarchy has no city to simulate, no economy to break, and no long game to plan. It is a top-down shooter built around short, loud bursts of violence, with a big score as the narrative excuse. That framing matters, because walking in with GTA expectations is the fastest way to be let down by a game that roughly 85 percent of its 1,103 Steam reviewers ended up enjoying on its own terms. The loop takes one line to describe. You move through a level from above, you shoot everything that moves, and when shooting is too slow you get into a car and use it as a two-ton shotgun. Vehicles are not a traversal convenience here, they function as a weapon class, and the moments where this thing clicks are the ones where you decide that driving through a crowd beats reloading. Released in 2016 and single-player only, it asks you to learn reflexes and routes rather than systems. There is no build order. There is no tech tree. Whatever optimisation exists lives in target priority and in how early you commit to a set of wheels. I'll be the first to admit this is not my usual shelf, so let me be precise about where the depth actually hides: mostly in restraint. Levels punish sprinting into open ground, and the gap between a clean run and a messy one is usually whether you cleared the flanks before pushing up the middle. That is a genuine skill curve, just a shallow one, and it tops out far earlier than something like Hotline Miami, which turns the same overhead premise into a puzzle about perfect sequencing. Lapovich's game is happy to be looser and sillier than that, and it plays best when you treat it as the fifteen-minute palate cleanser between two longer campaigns rather than the main course. Where it disappoints is variety and staying power. The core action starts repeating itself faster than the level count would suggest, and the humour, which leans entirely on the play-your-inner-sociopath premise, is broad enough that plenty of players will tire of the joke before the mechanics wear out. The feature list tells the rest of the story: single-player, Steam Trading Cards, Family Sharing. No co-op, which is odd for a game whose highlights are exactly the sort of thing you want a friend in the room for. No Workshop support either, so there is no mod ecosystem to stretch the lifespan, and that is the omission I feel hardest. Games this mechanically simple normally get rescued by community-made levels, and this one never got that pipeline built. Onboarding is minimal, though for once that is the correct call: there is nothing here a newcomer cannot fully understand inside ninety seconds. So who is it for? Anyone who wants a low-commitment, high-noise arcade shooter that runs on almost anything and does not care whether you finish it. If you are coming from the strategy and sim side like I am, the honest pitch is not depth, it is contrast: this is the game you open when you have just spent four hours micromanaging supply lines and your brain refuses to make one more decision with consequences. Set your expectations at that level and the 85 percent approval rating makes complete sense. Set them at open-world crime sandbox and you will bounce off inside an hour, and fairly so. Family Sharing means a household library can hand it to you for an evening before you commit, which is the smartest way to sample it. Judged as what it is rather than what its camera angle implies, it does its one trick well, and it does not overstay by pretending to be more.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on State of Anarchy.