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Stick with the Code Name: STEAM demo that's currently available on the 3DS eStore. It's a slow burner, which is to say that this is a Valkyria Chronicles-style squad-controlling game, and you'll have to play for the best part of an hour before you have much of a squad to control. The early minutes belabour the simple business of explaining turn-based movement and blowing enemies to pieces, and the whole first mission leaves you with just two team members to think about. Don't worry: a full team is coming. The lion is coming.The lion in question is the famous one - the one out of the Wizard of Oz who felt prematurely defeated by everything life entailed. Luckily, we meet him in Code Name: STEAM after he's had a change of outlook. He's feeling pretty good about things these days. I love this guy: his main attack is called the Lion Launcher, and whoever named it really wasn't screwing around. Study the battlefield, check your corners (whatever that means) and then decide which of your foes you'd like your lion to squish. With a muffled thrump you can send him spinning through the air, sailing across the map and dealing damage to whichever unfortunate soul gets his heavy boots through the face. That's lion logic. I'm trademarking that. (I'm not.)
There's been a lot of chat about Code Name: STEAM's vivid and angular Silver Age artwork, most of it negative. At worst, I think it's wonderfully ugly. I love its luridness, its barely-contained sense of energy. Most of all, though, I love the way it primes you for the zany treats that lie ahead in this unusual game. This, the art style whispers, is the kind of game where a lion might land on you out of the blue. Or where Abraham Lincoln could appear, all of a sudden, wearing a stars-and-stripes trenchcoat and announcing that rumours of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He's on a Steampunk zeppelin when he says this, naturally. A single, brisk "no time to explain" later, and he's off to assist the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. Aliens are invading. No time to explain.
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