Flashbang is back with a flash and a bang, the staple physics-based viscerality, and the staple removing dialectic of destruction vs. capitulation. Instead of being Taurus trying your hand at entreprenuership, you´re a lazy entitlement-jockey trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day while collecting guaranteed pay. Your job is to man a crane, though man-handling it is more accurate. The controls, like those of Minotaur In A China Shop, are intentionally difficult. There´s an inherent delta in where you move the mouse and how the crane follows, and they tuned the gamma up real high, it makes running in the original Super Mario Bros. feel like walking in The Legend of Zelda, by comparison. This sloppiness is amplified by the inability to directly control the height of the crane hook. There´s something in the noise.
The gameplay has two sides, stacking chuncks of building on top of each other and throwing those chuncks at the buildings of your rival. This is all relatively simple, the chaos in the controls gives it some spunk, but otherwise, pretty simple. The brilliance of Flashbang´s work is how they take a viscerally sticky prototype and then concieve of a holistic soul. The theme of the game is building stuff in a city, specifically as a Union worker in competition with a "Scab" who is competing based on market rates. Appropriately, the capitalism-tuned competitor is a machine, literally, controlled by the AI and not the least bit clumsy in his construction efforts. You, on the other hand, are all too human, you don´t calculate inertia in real-time, subtle ergonomic shifts in your upper arm will move the mouse ever so slightly compounding the shift, little flaws in drop timing compound further as things tip and momentum takes over. Frankly, you´re shite at this job and you shouldn´t be doing it. But its cool, you´re entitled, just as entitled as a web user when they click "Play Now". The clock is represented by your budget, ticking down like the S&P. The accompanying text is charming, gruff, and steeply political, Flashbang pulls no punches in loading their games with subtext just because they can.
The dynamic that results, psychologically and in game-theoric outcome maximization, is more similar to China Shop than any of their other titles. You have a point early on where playing the game, following the rules, doing something "productive" gives you more points. However due to the inefficiency at this productive task, based into the controls cake, you pretty quickly come to the point where you say "fuck it, lets smash it all". Once the scabs start getting some buildings up, but before they finish them, its time to start throwing trucks over there, try to cause them some property damage. After all, its zero-sum, if they lose you win. This game bears the theme of a bloated and inefficient faux-capitalism, manifested mechanically with sticky controls, manifested dynamically with the shifting pay-off matrix, manifested aesthetically in scheming construction workers duking it out in unhealthy competition, is perhaps the most efficient use of metaphor in gameplay in their entire portfolio.
