– Advertisement –
The distant future is pictured as the perfect world, with so many options for our lives. But, what if the future wasn’t so perfect? That world is the setting for Violation Will be Punished. Developed and Published by Igor Galochkin, Violations Will be Punished has intriguing ideas for its story and its gameplay. However, the repetitive music and poorly designed maps hurt the overall experience leading to a mediocre game.
The Distant Future
Violations Will be Punished begins with the player waking up from their synthesis. You are immediately put to work at the Space Mining mega-corporation as failure to comply with their demands will result in your death. After blocking the surveillance systems, you can choose to affiliate yourself with other factions, like Space Pirates, or cults. While all this seems interesting, the decision to align with different factions doesn’t change the game’s ending. This is quite disappointing as I would have liked to see multiple endings depending on which faction you worked with. Despite the lack of multiple endings, this game’s story explores its dystopian world very well and I thoroughly enjoyed how it was written.
Command and Conquer
Violations Will be Punished is a mix of real-time strategy games and turn-based strategy games. While you would think this would make for the ultimate strategy game, it, unfortunately, fails to create such an experience. The combat takes place on grid-based maps. The maps in this game are completely flat with no terrain diversity or obstacles. On these maps, you will control and create units to defeat the enemy faction and ascertain victory. While this seems simple, you are surrounded by the fog of war which can be temporarily removed by moving closer to the fog. This fog prevents you from attacking enemies, your movement, and seeing the placement of enemies within the fog. This fog can be quite annoying to deal with as it hinders your sight and makes it difficult to plan your attack.
The combat sections of Violations Will be Punished are a very mixed bag for me. While I enjoy building up my army and planning around the types of enemies I will be facing, the fog of war element hinders the enjoyment of the game. Furthermore, the maps don’t feature anything noteworthy and are flat and empty for no reason. It also seemed like some of the more difficult maps were just swarms of enemies rather than having that difficulty come from how the maps are designed. This is worsened by the slow pace of battle. While the pace of movement is quite fast, it forces you to watch every single enemy move and makes battles a slog to get through. Overall, while the gameplay can be fun, it has a lot of factors holding it back.
Oversimplification is the Future
Violations Will be Punished, just like the rest of the game, is mixed when it comes to the presentation. The UI in this game is surprisingly very good, it’s very easy to navigate and understand. The graphics look nice albeit simple. However, the “box art” or store page art looks quite awful and might be a turnoff for some players. Another bad thing is the repetitive music. This is especially an issue because the battles are quite long, meaning you’ll be listening to the same loop for long periods which can be quite annoying. Overall the presentation is middling with some highlights and some annoyances.
Violations Will be Punished
Violations Will be Punished, is a middling game. While it has interesting ideas, such as its multiple story paths and hybrid gameplay, both these aspects felt lacking. Furthermore, the gameplay is held back by its bad map design and fog-of-war mechanics. While I found some enjoyment with this title, I overall felt the game was lacking in many departments, and that hindered my enjoyment of the game.
