Anvillage

"Anvillage" might seem very familiar to you if you've seen any other games from Pixelabor, because this "developer" keeps copy + pasting different minor variations of [b]exactly the same[/b] incrementer/autobattler (think: worst ever ripoff of Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms to be rejected by Temu). This is no exception: It's just another rehash of the same minimum effort pixelcrap assets and game loop, arranged only slightly differently, and dumped onto Steam Direct to attempt to scam gamers out of a few roubles in exchange for utter garbage. Thankfully in this case it looks like Valve kicked this off the store, for what reason we don't know, but whatever it was, it was a good one. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2/Construct 3 game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. Those technical flaws drag this game well below the minimum quality standards expected of a modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? Anvillage is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]