9 Balls is indeed a billiards game, what happens when it is 8 balls instead?
This is the question I asked when I opened the title screen and instead of “play”, “options” and “exit” I was met with “8 balls” and “9 balls”. Now this isn’t relevant, obviously, but it was a lingering question. Why call it 9 balls when you have an 8 balls game too?
This is a shadow of a billiards game, it is essentially the “typing on an Xbox/PlayStation console without one of those little keyboard add-ons” version of billiards. Everything is so slow, clunky, and unintuitive. Instead of the cue being able to swing around freely as you’d position yourself around the billiard table, you have to pull, pull, pull, pull the cue round to where you want it to face. It’s clunky, and it’s sticky, and quite frankly, virtually unplayable.
On the other hand, the ball physics are to die for *sarcasm*. Whether you feel a bit more stricken when you attempt to line up the balls for a break, and see the pathetic click and hardly moving balls despite the strength-o-meter being at the highest possible level, or later when you attempt to take a long shot on a perfectly positioned ball, the meter is unable to provide the strength necessary to pocket the ball. The ball physics suck. I can’t even tell if it’s the “friction” on the table that’s causing this or a shitty mistake in the mechanics of the maths behind the ball movement.
The only time that the ball physics don’t suck is when I got bored with the game and started pelting all the balls full force and eventually managed to send the 8-ball flying off the table. I had a good giggle at the fact it could do that, and, and I was a little happier for a split second, then it happened. The next turn started, and the 8-ball didn’t reset, or come back at all. It was just gone. Keep on playing after that and the next turn around, *poof,* all the balls disappear from the table and the game is rendered unplayable.
If your game is going to have ball physics where things are hitting off each other at high speeds, things will fly into the air. Please, for fuck’s sake, put a damn invisible dome around the table to prevent balls from getting out.
Pros:
It looks like a billiards game, doesn’t look too cheap. (like all the graphics being made in Paint.)
No graphical or music issues or glitches.
Unexpected extra game mode (+1 point)
Doesn’t crash on load or during game.
Good cue sight (seeing where you’re firing the ball), some billiards games don’t give you that at all.
Cons:
You literally have to drag the cue across the table again and again and again to just get it to where you want to aim.
No option to turn off the cue sight, some people may want to play without the visual aide.
Balls have too much friction, or the maths just wrong?
Balls fly off into the sunset and never come back, thus breaking the game.
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: None Cards: No Worth The Money: No, despite being as cheap as it is. Just no.
Zesty Rating 1 Out Of 10 Boring, clunky, sticky and barely fun game of billiards.Not worth the spare change in your pocket, buy yourself a Freddo. The only redeeming thing about this game is that it looks the part, and it doesn’t randomly crash on you for no reason.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
So, here we are, in Action Rush. We start at the precipice of a rocky, floating island after just having come out of a very India Jones looking temple-like place. Flaming torches on stone pedestals, huge towering columns and dark shadowy corners. Completely contrasted by the protagonist, the woman, this woman that we are given looks so damn improper that not only am I questioning why I’m here playing this game, but also questioning why this woman is even here. Apart from that, the next things you see are big floating words on the edge of the cliff saying to follow the path.
Then nothing.
None of the images in this article in any way represent what the game actually looks like. Some aspects are the same, but most of the trailer and screenshots are misleading.
This is the only “tutorial” you get. It doesn’t explain to you that the cards that you collect along the way are unlockable abilities, and it doesn’t explain the little hovering sword things are that you’ve reached a checkpoint which saves your progress. I only found these things out after I went back and got the card after a few times failing the endless jumping puzzle because you NEED the double jump this first card gives you. (Not to mention you can jump while stationary which, as you would expect, makes you do a stationary jump. But use Shift while in air, after jumping stationary, you will start zooming “forward”)
Nevertheless, even from looking at these screenshots provided, they still adhere to the fact that this game is a big CTRL+C, CTRL+V spam.
There is nothing much else to say about this game. The music isn’t dramatic, so it doesn’t provide that necessary feel of a race, and all the assets you jump on being copy-pasted and no variation to it whatsoever, it honestly puts you out of the game. The second level, however, is a whole new bag of beans with “fall away floors” that don’t work half of the time and no clear guidance as to which way you’re supposed to go. The game generally being a mess, I just decided to not even further progress with it.
That and all the assets are floating mid-air, there was absolutely no effort to make the levels look like believable areas. It’s literally just floating assets.
Pros: – The game itself from a “distance” looks nice enough. – The music is equivalent to static noise or ambient song, enjoyable enough for some. – Asset placement is clean, there are no graphical errors or glitchy looking objects. – All Controls Work
Cons: – All assets within the game, no matter how well-placed or how suitable the game looks from a distance, does not make the fact that the game is one big copy-pasta of the same elements. Playing the game for the short amount of time that I did make me see it so quickly. It’s the same asset, over and over again. Even if they’ve managed to make it look different, it’s still the same asset! – There is no sense of “Race” or urgency, the game literally has the word “Rush” in it yet gives no reason to apart from a timer with too much time on it. – DESPITE looking fine, the actual hitboxes for the game are particularly bad, and some aren’t even set. Glitching your character through some platforms or just being “false platforms”. – The woman is super out of place, and dances? With Q and e? It’s so improper and there is honestly no reason for the emotes like dancing.
That, and look at the background. It’s such a cheap attempt at creating a scene, but it actually just stops at the horizon and is nothingness from there.
In conclusion, don’t buy this game. It has no soul whatsoever due to the lack of the effort on the dev’s part to make something more than just a few things you can jump between. It’s so cheap. Insanely cheap, and I’m not making a remark on the price it is, once again it’s the effort. If you’re super enthusiastic about 3D, 3rd person jumping platformers, go on and play it. I do warn you, you’ll hate yourself for it. I pray that you’re one of the silly people like myself who already had this in their library due to buying game bundles from sketchy websites. Don’t actually go out and buy this, as buying games like these enables people to think they can make a quick buck from these (un)passion projects. You’re honestly better off playing Cloud Escape.
Price: £2.09 Time To Complete: 36 minutes. Achievements: 35 Cards: No Worth The Money: No
(I’ve done it, I’ve found the old image they used to advertise the game, which better encapsulates what this game actually looks like.)
Zesty Rating 1 Out Of 10. You are Snow White, and this is the apple offered to you. Play any other jumping platformer game instead. By far one of the worst ones yet due to the lack of effort and overabundance of copypasting assets. Not worth your time or your money. No challenge, no love and no soul. Better off playing Diamond Hands: To The Moon.
Upon entering 12 Hours, you’re hit straight with that shitty indie feel and not to mention the long loading times. The screen shows some basic text with controls, but some of these controls seem confusing at first because they ask you to use the LMB to turn on and off your torch, but also to use it to attack… What? Nevermind, I’m sure it will explain itself eventually or make sense in-game.
You then start off in a corridor, no story as you are within a nightmare of the developer’s making. All that you can see will be the wooden floor, the dirty off-white walls, and the wooden doors. A very plain setting and not very spooky or endangering at all. Each door you go through will land you in one of the random rooms that this game possesses, where all the items have the exact same spawn location. Random rooms, but all the contents of the rooms are not randomised, weird. The red “blood” writing on the wall is extremely far from intimidating. Some writing is even supposed to be funny, but that completely devalues the scare of others! Whispering emanating from these walls, but it’s not subtle whatsoever, and for me, takes away some scare as the sound was clearly just placed on the wall.
The monster(s) you encounter (as far as I’m aware) is a homeless old man with a machete/butcher knife and a demon dog/human hybrid that I swear I’ve seen in some game before. These enemies will sometimes spawn right in front of you and, typically, not even facing you. They will spawn, more than likely, before you can reach/find a weapon, leaving you defenceless. The monster(s) can run faster than you and there’s no way to close the door to prevent them from attacking you (despite it giving you the option to interact with it) and there is no hiding mechanic. You just die.
On my last playthrough I was lucky enough to come across a baseball bat, which I found to my displeasure that as soon as I picked it up the torch went out. Baseball bats are two-handed weapons, and it wouldn’t make sense that I could hold a torch too, so that was fine, but now I have to fight the monsters in the pitch black with a baseball bat, big deal. Or at least it wouldn’t be if the game had not already put (from what I can tell) a headlamp on the floor. It told me to press G to turn it on, and it didn’t. It had a sign like a switchover sign with the button T, so I tried that. Nothing.
Obviously, the headlamp was put here with the combat in mind, so you could still see your enemies as you were fighting them. You technically still can, but you can only see their life bar. Oh, and the crawling monster had me dead before I could even get a second hit. *Shakes some salt.*
Pros: — The game works. No audio or auditory glitches and no game crashes. — Battery charge to battery finding ratio is sensible enough. — Combat is actually combat and not just a horror hide and seek. — Buttons (for everything except LMB issue) are set sensibly to global standard.
Cons: — Monsters spawn right in front of you, sometimes not even facing you. — If you don’t find a bat before the monster finds you, you’re fucked, as you can’t defend yourself otherwise. — The torch is terrible, and the headlamp doesn’t work. — There is no hide mechanic, and the monster(s) all run faster than you. No way to revive or recover. — Randomly Generated Map sometimes makes the most stupid of corridors, some you can’t even fit into.
All images are just random rooms that I’ve walked into. None are linked by anything whatsoever. They’re purely rooms with different things in them.
Price: £2.89 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: None Cards: No Worth The Money: No. Do not buy it.
Honestly, don’t buy this game. If this game is bundled with another game, but you have the option of adding something else instead of this one, do it. If you already have this game for some reason, play it. Play it and then let people know to avoid this as if it were quarantined. This is one of the many games that makes people avoid early access and indie tags, and gives the general idea to AAA players that “indie” means “trash”.
Zesty Rating 1 Out Of 10. The main suspect when it comes to giving Early Access and Indie a bad name. RNG Maps make for tight crawlspaces, no weapon to start despite the risk of being attacked, cheap, boring and dull. A must not play.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Saying this right here first before I write anything, as I know that the amount I write can prevent people from seeing how I feel about this game.
Do not buy this. At any cost. Do not. If you’re an unlucky sod who has this in their steam library already due to buying 150 game bundles from dodgy Russian game-code websites, then do us a favour. This game only has 4 reviews, write one. Even if it is only “This game is very bad.”, just be honest. In aide of mindless fools who would buy a game just because it’s on sale, turn them away with the sight of red. (Negative rating).
This game is a shill, a shell, and a bombshell all at once. Now, it’s not outrageously bad as the game actually functions and does not crash in the middle of playing like so many AAA games, that’s a plus, so we are now up to at least a 1/10. Then there is the matrix-like binary code type theme, which I’m fond of. I’ve always liked the green text on the black background aesthetic. The generation of money is also interesting, it is your standard “currency is click=dollars”. To level up, you purchase bits bytes and kilobytes to auto-collect your money. So now we are at least at a 2/10. (If we were giving out pity points, that is).
As soon as you enter the damn game you are hit with a wall of shattered expectations, no ear-blasting music, no cheesy copyright free music, no music that breaches copyright laws, nothing. None of the buttons make noises, nothing makes a noise. It’s just you, the button and the noise of your mouse endlessly clicking as you try to figure out why life has doomed you to this fate. Not of this game, but why you even thought this game would even be worth playing in the first place. Silence of the void, asking you the crushing question of why you even bothered to buy/download/play this game in the first place.
The fun stuff is, is that this game is so easy to replicate. It’s so un-unique. You get maybe 10 “enhancers” to your click bonus, and you’re just left to fend for yourself with your underpowered clicking and the severe lack of money to purchase your next 10 megabytes. Yes, the binary and computer theme is cool! So what? A mindless clicking game was made with visually intriguing aspects, not visually appealing ones, and boom, done. Perfect. You’ve got yourself what the developers consider a “game” worth “money”.
Do all these images look the same? If the answer is “Yes”, or any variation of agreeing, then ask yourself this: “Did you expect anything less?”
Pros:
It functions as a game, no crashes, major bugs with visuals or audio.
Computer Theme/ Binary Theme/ Matrix Theme
Cons:
No Music
No Sounds
No Effort
No Imagination
Nothing Unique
No payoff for all the time you’ve wasted clicking at binary.
This game is nothing.
Oh, and the achievements are borked.
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: There is no completion. I have 6.9 hours in the game for the “lols”, but it probably only took 1 – 2 hours to max everything out. Achievements: 5 Cards: N/A Worth The Money: It’s not worth wiping your arse with.
If you recognise this image, then you already know what I’m implying. Play it instead if you want a clicker.
This game is a shell of a clicker game, so much so that I don’t even consider it a game, as there’s no payoff. There’s no effort, no life, and no reason to play it. So, therefore, there is no reason to buy it or to endorse the “maker” of this “game”.
Zest Rating 0 Out Of 10. I’m drinking bleach for a pallet cleanser after that. The endless void which is the expanse of my life can’t hope to be just as dull, empty and meaninglessas this game. It’s devoid of passion, creativity, and meaning. Honestly, describing myself as well, but at least I have really nice eyes, the game can’t boast the same.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
20,000 Miles Under the Sea is, thankfully, a game that I’m pretty sure has always been free. To even call this a game is honestly an insult to even the top-tier trash games, such as ABST Clicker Farm and Abscond (Not the actual Abscond Game, but the “developer’s” audacity to release it as their game).
If you’re like me, and you have irritating, but very true thoughts pop into your head now and again, then you’ll know that there’s a certain point in life where the question: “How high can you count?” goes from being a matter of knowledge to a matter of will.
That is this “game”.
This “game” is just a test of mental endurance to see how long you can last, staring at a screen, while you lethargically descend into the depths of the ocean. There is not much to look at, you can’t look around or explore really. The only option you have in the game is “Auto-swim”, where you just descend, and “Not Auto-Swim” where you just descend, but you can sluggishly swim forward. Shoals of fish randomly spawn in and out with glitchy animations and bad implementation overall, phasing through solid rock and coral. Even Mario 64 had fish that you could interact with.
Of course, you can’t have an underwater game without having a horror element! So, only in the description of this game on Steam will you see that:
This is a simple idle horror game, and all that is required of you is to observe the life of the underwater world and wait.
Continued with:
But please remember that you are not alone – a terrible creature inhabits this abyss. If you’re too scared to meet this monster, you can tap out any time you like…
Ooo spooky, so where is this terrible sea creature? It doesn’t exist. All it is, is a terribly done jumpscare, which is easily avoided in one of two ways. Keep auto-swim on, as if you’re in auto-swim mode it doesn’t touch you for some reason (either that or the RNG was super unlucky), or moving away from the obvious red dots.
What also doesn’t exist is this bullshit.
This image showsthe developer of the game claiming that the first person to reach the bottom of the game will receive $20,000.
Yeah, I don’t think you’re fooling anyone with this.
This image shows the developer admitting that there is no cash prize of $20,000, and that money will only be handed out if people buy the music.
Yeah, you weren’t fooling anyone.
As far as I could tell, using all the resources that I could, the soundtrack was not bought once. Checking Steam sale records and various other 3rd party sites that track information like this, I found absolutely nothing. This was a clear attempt to get people to play it, so they could get better feedback for the game (which never happened) and get some pennies back. As discussed in the Abscond review/investigative piece that I wrote, it costs around $100 for developers to publish a game on Steam. It makes sense that the devs would make a desperate grab at their financial loss of a release.
Aside from this, what else do we have in the game?
Horrendous crashes that persist after the developer has updated/patched the game twice to “fix” these errors. Happening so often that I experienced at least 5 crashes within the 24 minutes I was able to hold out.
No option to mess with the sound. If there is, I cannot find it. Pressing the escape key, in hope that it would bring up a menu, took me out of the game and “marked my name” where I stopped. I had to start all over again. Thanks, this is undoubtedly what I wanted.
No clear indication, in the game, of how to play or that you have to avoid the red dots, or how to avoid them. Nothing telling you what or how to do things at all.
The “game” is so mind-numbing that the developer themselves instruct you: “you can minimize the game and continue to go down, doing other things.” if it’s too “tiring”. Just leave the game on, minimise it and do something more fun is their advice. Thanks, again. Brilliant game.
To add to the last point, the game is so badly optimised. Not to mention the crashes again, which are probably partially caused by this issue, but this “game” eats up all of your resources because of the bad optimisation. GPU? Gone. RAM? Gone. Shaders people! Fix your fucking shaders!
And to top it all off, is the most annoying part of the game. The name markers. So, you accidentally exited out the game, or you’ve had enough, and you exit the game. That’s a name marker added with your name on it, but it’s not just you who can see it. Everyone can.
And you can’t turn it off.
You must sink, 20k feet, staring at the blur of mashed up names as so many people either crashed or gave up within the first 5 minutes. It’s then evenly spacing out a bit more until you reach the 30-minute mark, and another massive mash of names again where people have taken a gigantic sigh and turned the game off.
This, but thousands more names overlapping each other, covering the entire screen.
The “beautiful, underwater scenery” in this game, you want to see it? Too bad, you’ve got to stare at this clusterfuck of names. Thank goodness, the game doesn’t “start” until you get past this absolute mess, although, I doubt you’ll be paying attention to find that out.
Price: N/A Time To Complete: Apparently around an hour. Achievements: 28 Cards: N/A Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free, to be honest.
It’s not worth a fun rating.
0 Out Of 10
While it is not the country of origin that defines the type of game a developer produces, you will find that a lot of “Shovelware” comes from Russia. People who are well versed in Steam and cheap games will know this already. I can only see so far, and my scope is limited to so many, different variables: — Time of purchase — Impulsivity — Jumping on bundles/sales — Complete disregard for my own enjoyment, just to sate an urge to buy something that looks bad.
Yeah, I’m bullshitting, but it’s a half-truth. There have been Brazilian games and Portuguese and English games I’ve played that all fit these categories. Cheap games, made to barely hold themselves together, to sit on Steam and slowly farm pennies until the $100 is paid back before Steam finds the game and deletes it. But not as many as I have Russian. This is predominantly because of where I bought these games initially, and where I get them from now.
DailyIndieGame is one of the big reasons as to why I have a lot of these (apart from the few times I went to Russian sites and paid £10 for 250 games) games are in my Steam library. The promise is, from the site, to highlight creator’s games. Giving them out in bundles for small prices. It’s honestly a decent way to do things, but after a while I had to take a step back and check what I was actually buying because… ehhhhhhh. I maybe just paid £0.66 for The Wasteland Trucker, but… Yuck, I paid THAT, for THIS??
Another culprit (of no bad means) is Steamdb’s Free Game activator. Any time a game goes up for free, whether just newly released for free or discounted to free, it will activate it on your account. It’s responsible for the fact I have over 11k items in my library now and if you load up my steam games list IT WILL CRASH YOUR CLIENT/BROWSER.
It’s safe to say, you can expect a lot more Shovelware reviews. We’ve got my whole library to look forward to reviewing.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Kartofelka is another game that I have no idea how it got into my steam library. It’s not free and never has been free. The lowest it’s ever been being £0.39 and still not enough to make me consider buying the game. Yet, I still have this game in my library, so at one point I asked myself, “what would be the harm in playing it?”
This game appeared in my library on the 14th of August 2019. I do not know what I was thinking when (more than likely in a shady £15 for 150 games bundle) purchasing this, nor do I wish to know what mindset I was in.
Now to make a very obvious statement. This game is not a masterpiece, nor is it even something you’d want to compare to a masterpiece to improve how the masterpiece looks. This game is another one of those games that I choose as an example to show people shovelware games, or low-effort games making the indie scene look like it only holds rubbish.
It’s another game to add to your library in the sense that it increases the game count that you have +1. It’s another game to add to your library as it has achievements. How many achievements you ask? Why… 4999 of course! Four thousand, nine hundred and-fucking-ninety nine. Not 5000 for some bloody reason.
This game is the same as what happens when people think they can just stream on Twitch and get 100 followers a day. Thinking they’ll start making enough money to support themselves within a month of just fanny-ing around on their webcam whilst streaming Fortnite. The developer of this game threw a platforming game together and created the game to give you 5k achievements. People who are on Steam who value achievements over anything else bought this game at £0.79 just for those. The developer abandoned the game around 20 days after posting it on Steam and reaping the rewards.
Okay, so, not such a big deal, right?
This was far from the truth, what had actually happened was that there was a huge problem coming from the target audience of the game. Those who bought it primarily for the achievement spam. The achievements didn’t even work! Through my personal experience playing the game, these reports were correct (and I was playing this a year after this issue unravelled), when I loaded up the game and the main menu popped up, the achievements started flowing in. However, when I started playing the game, the spam stopped. I thought that maybe it went silent because I was now playing the game, and it went onto a “Do No Disturb” mode. After about 30 minutes, I checked to see if I’d got all 5k “cheevos”, but I had not. They were broken, as people said.
So, the only two posts by the time I’d bought this game (Aug 2019) were, “HOW TO GET ACHIEVEMENTS” and “Achievements Stuck”. Considering that the last time that the game was updated was 20 days after the game was released, and that these discussions were made after that, it is reasonable to believe that the developer never addressed this issue.
In fact, in the post that the developer made on how to get achievements, they stated that they cannot fix the game due to having lost the original files for the game and only have the copy that was released. The fact that they couldn’t fix it was a little weird to me, as they created the game, and being experienced in computer game development myself, wondered why they couldn’t. Or why they didn’t bother.
One person in the comments of this discussion made a very valid point, however. “If the achievements aren’t working as intended, and the way to get them is to not play the game and idle the main screen for 3 hours, then take the achievements off.” This, of course, never happened. It was the main selling point for this game. And it’s continued to have sales, and discounts to encourage people to buy this broken game for it’s broken achievements.
Despite it being broken, and the developer acknowledging this, they refused to take the false promise of 5k achievements off the game as it was still bringing in money. Game-stats.com estimating that it’s brought in a net revenue that exceeds the cost of putting a game on Steam.
So, that was the tea about the game. Is there a lot to say about the game itself, besides the broken achievements?
Painful music that loops for every level. It sounds okay at first, maybe a bit elevator music-esque. About halfway through the loop, it sounds as if their cat decided to wreck the entire music production, jumping on everything and clawing at it. I’m in no way music professional, but I had to mute the game as it was setting me off sensory-wise.
The best jumping mechanics (sarcasm). If you are right beside what you want to jump onto, it won’t do it. It’s almost like there’s an invisible ledge preventing you from obtaining your goals, like a glass ceiling. Instead, it accurately represents what fat folk, like me, need to do to even get over a small fence, get a running start. Basically, you need to go backwards to go forwards+up. Oh, and jump is shift, so forget about opening Steam Overlay the default way.
The best glitches. There are moving platforms in this game. It makes the case for the best bugs. Basically, when you miss jumping onto the moving platforms (and you will) you will get stuck inside the platform. Not only that, but when you are on top of the platform, your sprite will float mid-air at the peak of the moving platform’s vector.
None of these are game breaking, but are incredibly frustrating from not only a player’s standpoint, but a game maker’s as well. Just a warning, though, don’t press the Esc key. If there’s a pause, Esc is not the pause key. You will lose all your progress and have to start again. But hey, more fun for you, you get to play it twice!
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: 1 Hour (3 Hours Idle on Main Screen if you actually want the achievements) Achievements: 4999 Cards: No, thank goodness. Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free.
Zest Rating 2 Out Of 10. Infuriatingly Bland An “OK” looking platformer, thrown together to make a quick buck out of people seeking to artificially fill out their Steam Achievement hoarding problem. Sloppy coding, hitboxes, and horrible music aren’t the least of your worries when the 5 Thousand Achievements don’t work either.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
DISCLAIMER: While this in my perspective is a “repost” of sorts, this review was never published on my previous place of writing. This is due to the owner of the website refraining from supporting any Russian developers because of the Russia/Ukraine war. I, myself, am making the executive decision to post this despite the war, as not “all publicity is good publicity”.
The next couple of reviews will be shovelware from (more than likely) Russian developers. These reviews are not positive, and I do not expect the negative things I say to prompt people to support these developers. Likewise, I'm aware that Russian game developers are not who are waging war on Ukraine, and countless people don't want this conflict.
Okay, so you’re probably wondering what I’m doing, reviewing a game like this. The answer is simple. The game is simple. I’ve played the game. I can make a review, so I will.
Bang Bang Fruit 2 is the sequel in a line of physics based, 2D, puzzle games, where the aim of the game is to shoot a fruit (strawberry) through the level and have it land on top of the cake. A basic premise, which as usual, is horribly implemented with very little effort.
Quantity over quality is how developers like these operate who create games like this.
This game is an extension of the sequel, which has the same concept. I’d even go as far to say that they’re probably just the same game, but I don’t think these developers would sink that low. (fingers-crossed they’re not like the devs of Abscond) However, they do jump on the all popular train of churning out easy-made games, quick throw-togethers to follow popular online memes, and hentai. Now, there’s nothing especially wrong with hentai, but when you’re able to throw out one a month, I start to wonder about the content.
Ah, battleship where if the opponent loses then they strip? Or maybe for each hit, a layer disappears. And the game previously?
*Shudder* One of those tile slider games…
Okay, so the developer of Bang Bang Fruit 2 mass produce things, but it’s not plagiarism, despite being blatant shovelware. Still not completely good, but at least the game is legitimate.
The game itself is a sound concept as far as simple puzzle games go, if it were not for the failing of multiple things. Firstly, the game in itself is not the most challenging. With about 30 levels in the game, the levels are altered in different ways to produce new experiences, new obstacles and new ways of trying to think out the puzzle. All of these things, however, can be completely voided by the fact that I can just shoot for trial and error, over and over again, with no downside. You aren’t concerned with the puzzles after a while, but it probably takes the same amount of time to shoot the fruit at the cake with this random chance. Things are altered, but not in such a way that continues to make it interesting. Colours are changed, backgrounds are different and that’s about it, asides from the new obstacles. The new obstacles being few and far between and not really engaging in raising the difficulty at all. I’ve actually found, myself, that on a few of the maps that encourage you to use the new mechanisms added, you can actually just fire the fruit regularly and pass the level.
Any difficulty experienced in the game is down to the horrible level design and weird physics.
So, how are the physics odd? They are not entirely. The fruit uses generic (non-bouncy)ball physics for the most part, acting like a lead sphere most of the time. Fruit does not bounce, but I’m sure at the velocity that it would achieve after being shot out of a cannon would give it enough energy to not act as flat as Amber Heard’s acting.
Once you have wrapped your head round that part of the physics, the cake itself is an entirely different demon. It has its own peculiar sense of gravity that is made so that when your fruit hits the cake, the fruit stays on the cake. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. One of the biggest problems I had with the game was getting the god-damn fruit to stay on the god-damn cake. It sounds like a cakewalk, it was not, even with the odd gravity applied to the cake. Every so often, the unusual gravity was not enough, and I had to watch the fruit slowly roll off the cake. Why did it not stop? No one knows! But on the other hand, at times the stopping mechanism for the cake was just too good! A shot that may have been a bit risky, but would’ve completely paid off, is your worst enemy. Your fruit landing on the corner of the cake, going in the direction where if it hits the cake it would roll to the centre… Cake-Gravity says no. In fact, the cake gravity is made in the way that regardless of what direction you hit the cake from, the fruit is programmed to only roll in the one direction. Which, in the risky case, is right off the cake.
Another point to stay away from this game is the lack of save function. Any progress you make, up to any level, of any stage is not saved. If you exit this game, even after completing 90% of this game, despite there being solid level structure with definite ends and beginnings, you’ll have to play the entire thing again from scratch. This is an absolute pain in the arse, specifically to those people who bought this game to reap the achievements from them. Why are the achievements relevant? They always are, but in this context, the previous game was one of those which gave you all the achievements as soon as you opened the game. Essentially purchasing a bundle of achievements and a completed game for money, without having to put in any skill or labour into earning anything. I don’t agree with the people that support this, who actively go out and purchase games like these, just to make their perfect game / completed game count higher. There’s no merit to it besides making yourself look like a huge “sadd-o”.
Example of said person I found making a “review” for either this game or another game. With 459,245 hours playing, which equates to 52 years. This person I doubt is even in their mid-30’s. 1332 Perfect Games with a 98% completion rate. Nah.
Continuing to lead players on in the false promise of steam trading cards, targetting another gullible audience (not all steam trading card hunters are gullible) which will scoop up any game with cards or the promise of cards. Cards for this game initially were promised via the tag system that devs can use after publishing the game, and at one point had even a dialogue that hinted/alluded to cards. These were eventually taken away, but the irritation by older buyers of the game is still seen in old reviews and discussions complaining about the blatant false advertising.
Developers had later informed those asking about cards that it was no longer possible due to the actions that Steam has taken to reduce the amount of money made by fake developers by introducing a “confidence metric”.
Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we’re going to move to a system where games don’t start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it’s actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who’ve played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you’ll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.
This is a great metric, while it does nothing to stop fake developers and Steam’s quality control continues to be at an all-time low, it’s guaranteed that fake developers are making less money than what they would.
Otherwise, a few last points for this game:
The music is abysmal. It’s the same thing over and over again for the whole 20 – 30 minutes you spend playing the game.
There is only one sound (which I heard) that is when you fire the fruit from the cannon, no contact noises and no noise for when the fruit hits the cake.
The level designs are really lazy, consisting of copy-paste elements of the same standard shapes, over and over again.
What’s even more lazy is that the only thing you need to do is time your left-click right. There is no finesse to the game or requirement for any brain strain. No changing the pitch of the cannon, no adjusting the strength of the blast, no factors that you can alter at all.
The game description on the store page is “Just make a cake.” The cake is already made! You’re just putting the strawberry on top! Also, shouldn’t it be a cherry? Cherries don’t go on cakes, but the phrase is “the cherry on top”, or “the cherry on the cake”, why is it a strawberry?
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: 38 Minutes – One Full Sitting Achievements: 36 Cards: No. Worth The Money: It’s not even worth the time I spent writing this.
Zest Rating 2 Out Of 10. As Sweet As Out-Of-Season Fruit. A cheap, nothing-more-than-template game, which adds to the clogged and oversaturated market which is Steam. Bright colours, but generally tacky. Works as a game, but that’s about it. A full 38 minutes in one sitting of your life that you’ll never get back, and you ask yourself, “Were the achievements really worth it?”
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Amazon Rush is an endless runner game, created at the peak of runner-game-hype, along with games like Subway Surfer and the like. Judging by the game itself, it’s honestly hard to tell whether it was an honest attempt at recreating the magic, or a blatant attempt at grabbing from the pockets of people who wanted to try something new.
This review will be more of an argument with what the developers describe the game as, so I will be listing the pros and cons first.
Pros:
A decent game in itself when it decides to work.
The game is competent enough to have AN objective.
The game provides a singular challenge for a singular cosmetic.
The game is not so lazy that it doesn’t have power ups.
Nice start screen and game over screen.
Cons:
The main character is bland and forgettable. There is nothing unique or interesting about it.
The RNG for which blocks spawn is absolutely atrocious. Blocks can spawn inside each other and make the game freeze because it doesn’t know what’s happening, or they can spawn too far unreachable for you to make it with power ups.
The moving background is only one picture long, so it’s the same image looping over and over again. A second image would’ve been good enough to just give it a bit more sustenance.
Not unique in any way.
Jumping mechanics have you float and then suddenly drop, making it almost impossible to predict where you’re going to land.
Dull with no rewarding aspects.
“Enjoy the Unique World of adventure and challenges”. This game is not unique, the only thing that’s even close to being unique is how bad it is, but since the greenlight is non-existent it’s “unique-ness at failing to be a decent running game” is almost snuffed out. The main character is forgettable. The background is so plain, bland and lazy that you swear you’ve seen it somewhere before. The power ups are indeed somewhat unique, but they’re always just out-of-reach so that if you go for them, there is no way to survive. The “Aboriginal” costume is actually the most unique thing about this, not for the promise of costumes as other games have done it better, but just for its design, which was obviously the “challenges”, the dev was talking about.
“…with lots of thrill and fun.” Fuck off. Thrill and fun are different and are achieved in different ways. This game is in no way thrilling, and it also is in no way fun. The difference between this, is that this game has the potential to be fun and captivating like most runners want to be as runner games are all about replayability. If the only thing you have to offer as a reward is 75,000 coins away and there’s nothing in between and nothing after that, players just don’t latch on.
“This running game is beautifully designed…” There’s no problem with this statement apart from the statement itself. The background design is tolerable, the character design is better than expected along with the costume, and the info screens are a nice touch with the bloody… arrows? Spears? I can’t tell what they are, but they do fit the Amazon theme. However, just all-out claiming that this is beautifully designed is a lot of bullshit, and we can all see that.
“…awesome sound effects.” Yeah, sure. You picked the right ones. All sound effects were appropriate. Congratulations.
Price: £0.79 (believe it or not, its base price used to be £2) Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 124 Cards: No Worth The Money: No. The game is broken, it can literally crash your Steam Client.
Do not buy this game. If you wish to buy this game, buy it when it’s on sale. 50% or above sale, and even at that it’s still not worth what you’re paying for it. At this point, it’s more beneficial for you if you buy it off a dodgy website, get hacked, have to freeze your account then claim it back again just to get the game.
Zesty Rating 1 Out Of 10. You’re being the victim of that weird trick people can do where they eat a banana, but then put the skin back the way it was to make you think there’s still a banana there. There’s not. Describes itself as unique and beautiful, maybe that’s what it’s mother’s told it. Awful Runner game, no reward aspects, only endless running and no gain. RNG breaks the game and Steam Client. Don’t buy this one.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Another one of these games that I do not remember purchasing. However, Steam remembers it as September the 30th of 2019, and I will take its word for it. But, this is also another one of these games I will tell you to steer clear of, and this time it’s not because the game is bad.
So, here I was, probably on a shady website or browsing Fanatical Bundles. If I’d seen this game on its lonesome, outside a bundle, I would not have bought it. It came in the bundle regardless, and as part of my “I need to get through my massive backlog of games” effort on Twitch, I played it to give it a go.
About this time I was thinking, “Wow, this game cost £0.99, and it’s not bad.”
I’m zipping about in this simple, and minimalistic, but challenging, nonetheless, game, and it’s pretty damn good. Still not groundbreaking or amazing, but nothing like the other shovelware on Steam which they let pass through these days.
Low and behold, I don’t need to look very far, and I find that this game is an asset flip, complete and utter plagiarism. The developer of this game is claiming this game as his own when the rightful maker made this available on Unity.
There are pros and there are cons, but Abscond is not this developer’s game. So, there are only cons here, which are:
“Dev does not know how to make a game” / “Dev is too lazy to make a game by themselves.”
So, what do we do now? I’m downright refusing to acknowledge the “developer” as the creator of this game, and left with nothing to gripe about.
Things like this do leave me to be curious, however. If a “developer” on Steam, is willing to get free assets from Unity, not alter the game in ANY manor and attempt to sell it passing it off as their own… will they benefit?
As it stands, Steam charges the developer $100 per game put through the Steam Direct program, meaning that as soon as a developer puts it up, they are $100 down. Unless you have lots of expendable cash, it’s not money you’d get rid of without being completely certain that what you’re doing is worth it/profitable.
So, the developer, XiNFiNiTY Games, takes a free asset bundle and sells it on Steam without further modification. — $100. If you’re a nerd like me and have Augmented Steam and SteamDB browser extensions, you will be given some useful information, but I’ll touch on that in a second. Looking at the initial data of the game that the regular Steam user gets, you can see that the game only has 9 reviews despite it being “released” in December 2017. You’d possibly think to yourself, “Fuck, maybe it’s just because it’s an endless, simplistic little arcade game that’s not had a ton of spotlight.” Scrolling further down, you’ll see the usual thing of there being actually more than 9 reviews, there actually being 24, which is still not a great deal despite the game being released for 5 years.
The bigger majority of these reviews being negative, calling towards the simplicity of the game, low effort and not being worth the money being asked of it. A couple of others, including myself, using these points others had made along with the fact that the game is an asset flip to point out why it was so ridiculous that it was paid for.
24 is still a small number, but thanks to my add-ons, you get a rough estimate of how many people actually own this game.
Now, as you can probably tell already by looking at the picture. 20k to 50k is not really that much of an “accurate number”, nor is it really all that accurate at all. It’s quite the ballpark range.
Okay… So let’s outsource this a bit, and try a different thing to guess how many people own this game.
Oh…
So, we have the same numbers from SteamSpy, but some huge numbers from PlayTracker. And honestly, on first viewing of that number it seemed unreal and did not want it to be accurate. But concerning the number of reviews, and also looking at that third number (actually the first in the set, but the third that I mentioned), it looks a lot more realistic.
Therefore, on some basic maths, entirely ignoring a few factors such as Steam sales, discounts, and devs giving their keys away to bundle sites: If SteamSpy’s upper estimate is correct, and 50k copies have been sold, then you’d be right to assume that they’ve pocketed $44,900. Which would be absolutely ridiculous.
Even going by the “Owners By Reviews” lower estimate it would still mean that the “developer” made a net profit of $1340, which is still disturbing considering that this is not even their content.
So, looking a bit further into this game, on various blogs, I happened upon a very useful site, or maybe I found it useful as it provided me the information I wanted to see. (Rather than the news I wanted to hear).
A site known as Game-Stats that has a lot of information on games had something more in mind of what would’ve been earned by the so-called developer. Fair enough though, despite being a lot more realistic and what I’d had in mind, it was still unfortunately above the $100 they had to pay to release “their” game. Meaning, at the end of this (if this website’s more realistic looking evaluation of the revenue is correct) they still gained $70 from essentially stealing someone else’s work and slapping a different name on it.
Meaning, if anyone wants to almost double their money, just steal someone’s game and slap your name on it and pop it on Steam, they won’t do anything about it.(obvious sarcasm)
Hi, I’m not finished yet. So, this “developer” can yoink practically an asset pack from Unity, not change anything about it and claim it as their own, gaining almost double their money back.
What if this is not the only time they’ve done this? Or at least, that’s a question that I start to ask myself because I’m a weird one like that and apparently have too much spare time, despite never seeming to have any at all.
XiNFiNiTY Games have 22 games to their name, 6 of which being DLC (Downloadable Content), so we can bring that number down to 16. One of the first-ever games, of which being “Infinity Wings – Scout & Grunt” actually gathered enough reviews from people to generate an average audience score, which is not a good one. What the more early games of XiN have in common is that they’re not the sole publisher of the game, and that OtakuMaker SARL are the ones publishing instead. These games also still not getting great receptions, but looking and seeming to be more fully fledged games than the Abscond rip-off.
The first one that we actually take a look at is another game with a very similar thumbnail to Abscond (in fact, they all are very similar looking in terms of simplicity). Spinning Around is a basic game where you have to fly your Spaceship into the correct colour, while the colour position that you have to fly through changes. You’ve all seen someone playing a mobile game with this concept. This is another blatant rip-off, another asset bundle ripped from the Unity Asset store, a different title slapped onto it and published on steam as their own content. What is the net profit that site predicts this time? $320.
Okay, let’s try another one. Infinity Trip. Another unity asset flip, as the real developers can be seen right here. How much is their estimated return? $56. Okay, thank goodness, nearly everyone reviewing this one knew that it was an asset flip immediately. Must be a more popular asset bundle than the rest.
Stellar Warrior? Phone-game esque, so most likely also stolen. Net Revenue $0 (Seems improbable, yet there are no good reviews at all about this game).
Cubic Color? More than likely. (Can’t find original source). Net Rev $37.
Color Circle? No evidence as far as I can see, but it looks exactly like what they’d usually steal. Net Rev $75. *All “Net Revenue” are estimates made by the Game-Stats website.
So, from the asset flipping, player scamming side of things, we have 13 games that have possibly been attained from the unity asset store. All of which have been turned around, had a new name slapped on top of the old one and put on Steam to be sold as “their” game.
13 x $100 = $1300 So, the devs have spent this much putting the games on Steam, but did they get back what they spent? $75 + $37 + $130 + $260 + $18 + $94 + $0 + $110 + $56 + $340 + $56 + $320 + $170 When you look at it, there are plenty of small numbers that are below the $100 threshold, but a few big numbers. The gamble was really risky, as not a lot of their flips generated a profit, but the ones that did generate a profit only did so marginally in comparison to indie games that have any real effort.
Estimated Net Revenue for all (possible) asset flip games being $1,666. (*Gasp* 666) Provided they paid for each game to be put on Steam, they presumably made a $366 profit, assuming the website is more accurate than the others. This is not amazing, and taking a close look at their profits from each game, if Trigonometry hadn’t done as good as most of the others, they would not have as much of a profit as they do now.
Color Circle
But realistically speaking, however, what if this hadn’t stopped in 2018 and this developer kept selling asset flips? Also bringing to attention, these games are still live on the Steam store, waiting to be bought. This “developer” can still obtain money right now from any unsuspecting buyer. This slow gain of $366 has happened over the course of five years, acting like an offshore bank account or investing in a really slow-moving stock, but it’s still there.
You can probably guess my opinion on the matter. I find it morally unethical, and completely condemn this as while it’s still apparently legal, it’s harmful to the image of “indie”. Not only that, but it damages the reputation and the credibility in the eyes of players towards other games that use bought assets for their games, such as PUBG. Many indie game devs either do not have the skill, time, or the know-how to pursue making their own assets. Buying these asset bundles and game templates are what gives these developers a head start and a clear direction of where to improve from, or what to use, or how to use what they have. Unlike these innocent game devs who use these assets as intended, XiNFiNiTY take templates as they are, change nothing, and slap their name on it.
Call this whatever legal term you wish, forgery, plagiarism, theft. At the end of the day, it’s certainly a scam. You can get the tools to make these games for free, you get the templates for free (sometimes paid, but a lot XiNFiNiTY took were free or cheap), and “make” exactly what XiNFiNiTY copy and pasted yourself.
If you come across any games by XiNFiNiTY Games, then please do not add to their pool of money that should’ve been distributed to the real developers. There are many other better indie developers, and there are many other better indie developers that actually have done the work they are advertising.
The amount of time and research put into this topic could’ve been a lot more, and I would’ve gone further into this if I had the energy. However, this was made a lot quicker due to two characters on Steam. The first being Zaxtor99 TTV, whose review first alerted me to such a thing as an asset flip. I’d always suspected as such, but after playing Abscond and then being shown where it originally came from, I was gobsmacked that someone would actually do this. Secondly, to the person behind the curator calledSturgeon’s Law, Obey the Fist!, who almost had every link to all the assets that were stolen. I’ve also now read a whole Wikipedia article on “Asset-Flips” and an article/interview with Bennett Foddy and am a little asset-flipped out now.
Edit: I’ve been made vaguely aware that it’s somehow possible for developers to cheat the $100 entry fee for releasing a game on Steam by dropping more than one game at a time (or something). I’m not fully versed in this knowledge and can’t find any info on it at the moment. But it does, however, change a lot of the “predicted profit” if these “developers” managed to do this too, I, however, will probably look at this another time.
jinxlgamez
Doubtful Player 
