Conglomerate 451, the cyberpunk dungeon crawler, enters Early Access this week

Conglomerate 451 looks a bit like a futuristic Legend of Grimrock: its turn-based combat and grid-based movement is classic dungeon crawling RPG fare, but it's set in a cyberpunk world full of evil corporations and state-sanctioned killing. Developer RuneHeads this week announced that it's coming to Early Access in just four days—on May 23.

As the CEO of a government-backed Special Agency, it's your job to clean up Sector 451, which is riddled with crime and corruption. To do that, you create an army of clones, customise them to your liking with weapons, armor and cybernetic implants, and then go and murder everything in site. When they die, they're gone for good, a la XCOM.

Dungeons are procedurally-generated, and the Early Access version will have one of the four planned districts. RuneHeads says it'll be in Early Access for between six and eight months, and during that time it'll get up to six times bigger. That's a lot of growth in a short space of time, but let's see how they get on—we'll know early how quickly it's improving because the devs plan to release two updates a month.

Away from combat, you'll be managing a base and researching new tech to upgrade your super soldiers. When the game releases, the plan is to have 10 character classes, more than 100 skills and more than 30 cyber implants that can help your clones fill a particular role. Perks, mutations, and diplomacy will be in the final game, but aren't in the Early Access version.

I'm interested to see how RuneHeads handle the story and themes: the devs say it's pulpy, but the thought of sending government-backed robots to wipe out areas of a city certainly sounds pretty heavy (Andy has more to say about that here).

If you want to check it out, the Steam page is here. It doesn't yet have a price listed, but RuneHeads says whatever it costs will likely increase as it nears full release. You can check out the combat in the trailer at the top of this post.