Game Info Box Art N/A Platform 3DS Publisher Nintendo Developer Intelligent Systems Release Date Mar 13, 2015

Code Name: STEAM has a truly bizarre premise: Abraham Lincoln fakes his own death so he can build a steampunk army of famous literary characters like John Henry and the Cowardly Lion to battle an alien invasion. It's baffling in the best possible way.

If only the incomprehensible choices had stopped at the narrative. With wild difficulty spikes, intentionally annoying battles and the absolute worst pacing in any game I've ever played, there aren't a whole lot of decisions in Code Name: STEAM that make much sense at all. There's no overhead view, no map, no nothing If you've played XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Valkyria Chronicles, the tactical action of Code Name: STEAM shouldn't be too foreign. You lead a team of four literary heroes into a grid-based battle against an ever-approaching enemy. With each new turn, each hero is granted a certain amount of steam that they can expend moving, attacking or using other abilities. If a character withholds enough steam at their turn's end, they enter an "Overwatch" mode that lets them automatically attack enemies that hover into their field of view.

Despite a few variations, your goal typically is just to get at least one of your characters to a set "goal" square. You can take out enemies that stand in your way, but more aliens will just respawn in at random times and locations, so dawdling almost never makes sense. This messaging is complicated by collectibles you need to upgrade your squad throughout the level. You have to expend steam and turns to find these items, so how, exactly, it's best to proceed is often a crapshoot. Getting one soldier to a designated spot should be a snap, but it's often complicated by one of the first truly odd facets of Code Name: STEAM. There's no overhead view, no map, no nothing, it's solely dependent on what you can see from each of your teammates' perspectives. Lose track of where the goal is and you could spend turn upon turn ambling around looking for it. At one point, infuriatingly, the goal was hidden behind an enemy. Ugh.

The lack of an overhead view is intrinsically connected to Code Name: STEAM's biggest sin. After you take your turn, you're subjected to an enemy phase of movement. Sometimes that means watching an opponent clobber one of your teammates, but most of the time you don't know where every enemy is, so you spend a few mind-numbing seconds just staring into space as this mystery enemy moves. To be clear: That's a few mind-numbing seconds per enemy mind you. That quickly piled up to chunks of 60 to 90 seconds where I was unable to do anything. The best bit? This is unskippable, and unfast-forwardable. This would be bad in any game, but on a portable platform where you may just have a few minutes on the bus to play? It's unfathomable.