In The Company Man, you risk it all to climb the corporate ladder… or get fired trying. At least, in theory.
When it comes to ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, most of us are rather familiar with the phrase, knowing that we need to put in the elbow grease, buckle down, and soldier on through another day of work to prove your skills and your dedication. The Company Man, produced by Forust Studio, makes an attempt at taking that phrase just a bit more literally.
The Company Man is a 2D action platformer, with all the hallmarks of a typical entry into such a genre. You play as Jim, a rather run-of-the-mill salaryman fresh out of university. He finds his career with the Good Water Company and seems to have a rather stable position, though his aspirations are big. However, Jim’s job stability goes out the window rather quickly, and he’s soon put into quite the precarious position: he must quite literally fight to keep his job, lest he takes just enough hits to get fired.
The mechanics of The Company Man are nothing particularly earth-shattering, though that’s not necessarily a downside. As typical of the genre, there is platforming, and there is combat. Platforming consists of a variety of jumping-based puzzles, managing mechanics, and dodging enemies. Each level has its own unique mechanic that you’ll have to come to understand if you want to make it through to the end, such as giant scales to weigh down properly or falling interns to weave between. Jim has the ability to dash, which functions mid-air as well as on the ground, and for the most part, the actual controls felt solid and smooth to the point where platforming felt fun when it was engaging.
For the combat, Jim carries around a fun little contraption that is his computer’s keyboard, shifted into a huge sword that you swing around, ‘firing’ enemy employees that dare to stand in your way. Later on, Jim also unlocks the ability to write scathing emails of different varieties, which is a delightful flavor to describe your ranged attacks. You can unlock different types of emails as the game progresses, from simple, long-range zoning emails to close range, mass CCs that function like a wicked shotgun blast.
However, despite this strong and wonderfully flavored foundation, going through the seven levels that The Company Man has to offer began feeling somewhat tedious. The problem that I found is that The Company Man does not quite live up to the potential that it presents to you.
As stated prior, The Company Man has seven levels. None of these levels are particularly long. What this means for the game is that many of these interesting mechanics that these levels are based around rather consistently went undeveloped, and instead offered something that did not feel particularly different from the last level. There is nothing wrong with short games, of course, but The Company Man does not feel like it does as much as it could with the time where it has your attention.
Despite the levels being short, they are unfortunately rather sparse with their hazards. Many of the puzzles they throw at you have no threat past falling off of the platform you’re standing on and being forced to start at the beginning once again. Quite a few of the mechanics feel as though they go underutilized. For example, in one of the later levels, there are televisions that are scattered around, which teleport Jim around if he touches them. These teleporting TVs don’t feel like they are used for much besides covering distance, especially once the similarly new bouncing floor mechanic shows up for the second half of the level.
It also feels as though there is no urgency to solving these puzzles, and a lack of any sense of urgency means a lack of excitement. There is no timer propelling Jim or the player forward, and the enemies that are scattered around these levels do little to force Jim forward.
Speaking of enemies, they require a surprisingly small amount of your attention. Despite their beautiful art and great concepts, you have to worry about very few of the sparsely placed enemies. In certain areas of some of the levels, there are doors that open only once certain nearby enemies are defeated. These are the only areas in The Company Man where you are actually required to fight at all, outside of the boss battles.
A worryingly large amount of the enemies present can simply be jumped over or dashed past. I also found it strange that some enemies have contact damage and some don’t, which I only found out because I tried to dash through so many enemies in order to get through levels quicker. Perhaps you’re not supposed to dash past all of the enemies, but it is hard to incentivize doing so when the payoff is exactly the same as not doing so.
The bosses that The Company Man sends at you fare somewhat better, being cornerstone enemies of each level, but are unfortunately not that much harder. Many of them have somewhat simple patterns, a lack of attack variety, or both. Much of the time that I ended up taking damage from a boss is when I got impatient and dashed in for a few greedy strikes instead of playing it safe and dodging properly.
With those points in mind, you might be wondering the following: if the puzzles are underdeveloped, most enemies do not need to be fought, and boss fights are not particularly interesting, then what do you do in The Company Man? The answer is… well, the kind of boring parts of platformers. Quite a solid chunk of many of the levels are kind of empty, and so you and Jim spend a not-insignificant amount of time just… moving forward. No puzzles, pretty much no enemies. Just platforms.
The only good thing about this ‘dead space’ that makes up a good portion of the game, and one of The Company Man’s unambiguously stellar features is that you get to look at the gorgeous art.
Every single piece of art in The Company Man looks amazing. Jim and all of the other characters that appear look great, with their own quirky appearances that make them stand out. The level assets are pleasing to look at if you take the time to (which you will be more than capable of). And the backgrounds, don’t get me started. The level backgrounds are absolutely phenomenal, so full of character and unique flair.
Each and every level looked so distinct, with its own take on a twisted corporate setting that just felt right. It’s clear that there was so much effort put into The Company Man’s levels, particularly the backdrops, in order to make things feel fantastical and wild, while still portraying what they needed to portray, and it was absolutely aced. At times, I wanted to just stop and stare, which I was, unfortunately, able to do more often than not.
Overall, I think that my opinion on The Company Man is that I wanted it to trust me as a player more than it did. It has a solid foundation, and you can see the potential peeking through. The art is absolutely fantastic, and the controls feel sharp and responsive. However, it feels frequently like The Company Man is afraid to go more in-depth into its own mechanics, and suffers greatly for it. I got the impression that it did not want to appear too obtuse, but in the process of preventing that became far too flat.
The Company Man just needs some more elbow grease and a touch more ambition, and it could get that promotion that it’s always dreamed of.
And with that, we’ll clock out of our review for The Company Man. If you want to check out the game itself, you can check it out on Steam, Nintendo Switch, or its official website. You can also check out Fourst Studio’s Facebook page here.
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