Greed Corp is available now for Xbox Live and the Playstation Store (assuming your Playstation can get online). What might look like a detailed fantasy strategy game is no such thing. Don't be fooled by the production values, evident in the screenshots but particularly as you're playing. You might look at the detailed charming graphics for each of the four unique factions and make some assumptions. You'd be wrong. This isn't the game it looks like you're getting. It's both less and more.

After the jump, I'll explain. And warn you about a couple of really bone-headed design decisions.

One of the bullet points for Greed Corp is that it includes four factions. They each have distinct units, buildings, tiles, and even sound effects. But they are identical to each other in terms of gameplay. In fact, it's a bit disingenuous to call them factions. That's like saying there are eight factions in Monopoly: the dog, the hat, the iron, the battleship, and so on.

But Greed Corp has no time for factions. It is a very very simple game. The basic idea is that move armies around to claim hexes. The winner is the last man standing. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Within this simple framework, there are four pieces. The arguably most important is the harvester. That's how you make money. A harvester gradually eats the ground out from underneath itself until it goes tumbling into the abyss. The armory is your only way to put armies on the map. The cannon can damage distant armies and hexes. It's slow to load and expensive to fire. Finally, there's the insidious but prohibitively costly carrier, which lets you fly an army to any point on the map.

All of these bits are so simple that you might find yourself disappointed with Greed Corp. This could easily be a board game, played out on a few cardboard tiles with a handful of plastic pieces. But that's also its strength. There is no randomness. Nothing is ever hidden. The only unknown is what the other players are going to choose to do. It's a simple design with an AI smart enough to understand how to play.

And as a multiplayer game, the simplicity is rare and almost perfect. This is a wonderful game to play with a few friends in the same room, or online. In fact, the main reason to plow through the single-player game is that you'll want to unlock more maps for multiplayer games (you're certainly not going to get many achievements, considering how punishingly difficult they are to earn). Greed Corp may be simple, but it's charming, it's got character to spare, and it's relatively easy to corral your friends into playing once you figure it out well enough to explain to everyone else.

However, the guys who were clever enough to make this smart simple game made two short-sighted decisions that hurt Greed Corp. The first is that they don't do a good job of presenting the information. The basic mechanics of gameplay are very trial-and-error. You'll lose a lot of missions trying to wrap your head around a few ideas that aren't explained anywhere. It wasn't until I was until maybe a dozen matches into the game that I realized my armies can move farther in friendly territory and cannons have some strange limitations on where they can fire. Why isn't this stuff explained anywhere?

But the really stupid thing in Greed Corp is that you have a sixty second timer when you take your turn. I can see the value of this in online multiplayer games against strangers, where it should be included as an option. But against my friends? And in a single-player game against the AI? What's the hurry? Does the AI have to be somewhere? Is it getting bored waiting for me to take my turn?

Greed Corp is that rare breed of smart simple downloadable games on next-gen systems that doesn't get cluttered up because it's on a next-gen system (see the recent Panzer General game for an example of that). So long as you don't get fooled by the detailed graphics, and if you don't mind hurrying up to take your turn, this is the next best thing to having a really cool board game in your closet.