I first played The Company Man back in 2021 on the Nintendo Switch. Even though I don’t get into platformers too often, I did walk away with mostly positive impressions. And having played it again — now on the PS5 — my takeaways are mostly the same, although this time around the aggravation factor was noticeably higher.
Let me start by saying that The Company Man’s biggest strength is its cartoonish art style and visual design. This game very much feels like a lost gem from the ’90s heyday of the SNES and Genesis. And in a lot of ways, this game also plays and controls like those older classic platformers. Most of the levels require you to tackle a handful of level-specific NPCs, each with a specific motif. This is usually a punny take on corporate archetypes, which is completely in line with The Company Man’s overall ethos of lampooning the big corporation ecosystem.
Unfortunately, most of these tropes are pretty well-worn in this day and age of heartless megacorporations, and they have been skewered by television shows and movies and even other video games before The Company Man. Although there is a darker undertone to the cartoony mayhem and violence, there isn’t much of a message here other than restating the fact that a person’s drive for success can come at the expense of family or loved ones. It’s not a bad message, but it’s not necessarily new or revelatory.
Not that one would look to a game like The Company Man for the meaning of life, but still…
If you are familiar with side-scrolling platformers, you will no doubt pretty much know what to expect from The Company Man. It delivers enough solid platforming and combat to scratch that itch, should one have an itch that needs scratching.
For my tastes, the controls are mostly responsive. The character’s jump might leave something to be desired, but he always stops on a dime, which means that last-second slipping or overstepping is not an issue.
The combat is pretty light. You’ll use the square button for your main strike and triangle for a projectile you’ll unlock partway into the opening level. You can, of course, jump, and you have a dash that is used in both traversal and combat. It’s par for the course for a side-scrolling action platformer, but there are no combos or anything like stringed-together attacks. You mostly just spam one or both of the attack buttons, rinse and repeat (although your projectiles are on a cooldown with a limited number of consecutive uses).
Some of the encounters can be avoided by jumping or rushing under an enemy, which I appreciated — sometimes it’s nice to not have to fight every idiot you come across. But a majority of the time, there will be blood, so to speak, and every now and again you will encounter several enemies compiled in a gauntlet-style locked room that need to be vanquished in order to progress.
Along the way, you’ll collect coins from defeating enemies, but there are also larger coins hidden throughout levels to reward derring-do or exploration. With these coins, you can purchase upgrades at the coffee shop in the lobby of the corporate office tower. These range from extra health or number of projectiles you can shoot to regaining health from enemies you kill.
The latter of those upgrades is a personal favorite of mine, considering the number of cheap hits you are subject to throughout The Company Man. A lot of these occur as you are on a conveyor belt or moving platform, where a previously unseen offscreen enemy appears from the border and immediately fires off a paper airplane projectile or just comes careening at you, giving you little to no time to react. I don’t mind a challenge, but the unavoidable hits are far from fair-play obstacles; this isn’t Elden Ring after all.
And that really just leaves the humor that the game is bubbly with. For the most part, that aspect fell pretty flat for me, possibly because I work in a corporate environment myself and have heard this all before; none of it is especially fresh or insightful. At this point in pop culture, I think the broad, tired, over-the-top depiction of the corporate dog-eat-dog environment just feels stale at this point — there are ways to do this effectively, but The Company Man just doesn’t have any teeth to bite with.
Plus, there’s a text window that pops up every time the character has a thought or musing, and it blocks a rather larger portion of the screen and is really distracting.
And that’s pretty much The Company Man in a nutshell for me. The 2D platformer is an age-old staple of video gaming. If this is the type of game you flock to, you should be able to tell simply by looking at screenshots. If this is your jam, I’m sure you will find an enjoyable experience, though certainly not a perfect one.
All that to say: The Company Man is a glass half full of an even-keeled Lager.
Disclaimer: I was given a review code for The Company Man on PS5, but the opinions expressed in this review are my own.
