Abathor - Atlantis Landing

Hours played at review time, across 44 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

"Abathor - Atlantis Landing" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Abathor". Abathor is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers on Steam. Abathor at least has co-op to slightly differentiate it from most of the trash, and plays like an arcade ripoff of Golden Axe only even more 2D as you hack and slash in a 1980's fantasy movie themed brawler/platformer game. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Abathor, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Abathor - Atlantis Landing" too. The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to fork out a whopping fifteen bucks on the full product, and no pixelcrap is worth fifteen bucks. If amateur developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real developers, they should at least learn how to do graphics properly first. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.