CorpoNation: The Sorting Process Review (Zalym)
A dystopian sorting game with a consistent learning curve, decent (if typical) story, and unfortunately some pretty gnarly bugs. (However, the devs are active in responding to and working on them.)
There's a certain beauty that has penetrated the blue-hell in which you will find yourself. Not at first, no. But as you continue to decorate your pod, making it your own so to speak, the shades and hues of blues and whites grow on you. That makes the small pops of color you will run into amazing while the eventual ominous red is almost eye-burning.
The game play is basic and repetitive. You'll have to decide if that is OK for you--watch a video for the game if you have questions about that, But don't watch too much. The story that is here is easily spoiled. If you've seen a few minutes of core game play, then you've seen what you will be doing.
However, even with basic gameplay, the challenge of keeping track of an ever-increasing range of data/tasks is well-paced well enough to fight off tedium after the first couple in-game "weeks" while keeping the monotonous feeling that this work is supposed to give you.
Also, there's one tool in the game called a fixer that apparently works far better with a controller than a M/KB. I don't know if that is true, but I hated using it with my M/KB so maybe that claim has some validity. I wouldn't want to play the rest of the game with a controller, so I just did the best I could and moved on.
Anyway, the story itself is fine. If you are familiar with this genre and setting of games, you could probably guess the concept and then storyboard a plot for it and be 80% correct before you even purchase it. It's not bad, but it is not inspiring either.
My biggest game-play related gripe is what happens when the game ends and what it means for your progress, especially if you are achievement hunting, When the story is over, there's no way to continue you progress. If you don't start a new game, the game simply returns back to the beginning of the last in-game day. This leaves you without the ability to finish out your progress on the in-game apps, so if you are chasing glory in those, you need to make sure to get that done before the end of week 10.
The bugs, however, are still a big mess at times--especially in light of the once-daily save system.
While this kind of save system is common in this genre of game, it rarely gets in the way of progression. But right now, there is a real risk of losing progress in Corponation. (So much so I started making manual save file backups at the start of each week--easy to do, but annoying.)
The worst repeatable offender of this "lost progress" can easily be seen in the in-game fighting app. A fairly common (if not frequent) CTD can cost you tons of progress as the in-game app does not save progress separately. So, if you are trying to get to that 50-win streak in Ringo's Fighters, and you are playing for a long session, you run the increasing risk of having to redo a lot of effort as you progress past each fight. (Ask me how I know about that one...)
The second worst is with a core end-game system called the Nexus. You'll learn about it in game, but the way you assemble it is very finicky, even after a recent patch to work on. It was very easy to lock the game up because the game wouldn't allow me to grab a piece I needed to rearrange it while not letting me back out of the system to try again--meaning I had to re-do the entire day to try again.
Those are the worst bugs, and they are infuriatingly bad. However, the game is very enjoyable--and they ar working to polish it up. Save yourself some heartache and make manual backups of your save file. With all of that in mind, I'd say get the game, head to your pod, and always remember to "Work Hard."