Arena 54 - Visual Novel Action Adventure

Arena 54 - Visual Novel Action Adventure is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. There's some kind of utter garbage story about arena fighting, and the developers wilfully attempt to mislead gamers by referring to this as an "action adventure", which is simply a falsehood. There's no action, and "combat" is just a matter of answering a question then clicking along in the E-book on the set path. What a joke. This tripe isn't making books better, it's just making gaming worse. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. The E-Book is very very short and can be finished in 15 minutes. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos. On the upside, the E-Book does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. These technical defects push this E-Book below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the E-Book all-time peak reader count was only ONE reader. That's right, only one person ever read this at a time. When I read this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak reader count for the E-Book. OUCH. The only reader 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 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected. So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Arena 54 - Visual Novel Action Adventure is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book 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 E-Book.[/quote]

Oooh okay! I've been wondering what this game was about for a while, and I finally managed to get to it! ^^" This game... Is rather short. My playtime is literally 15min. XD Buuuuuuttt... I was actually interested the entire time and entertained. You fight in an Arena (duh) and get to know the backstory a bit of what's going on + each character has their own story to tell. Designs are pretty fun to look at too! During a fight you... Fight and then to win you must answer a question. What questions those might be? I wont spoil... But there are two answers: so even if you don't know the answer or are too lazy to learn it -> 50% you MIGHT get it right. Hah! The story isn't dull (not to me) and the higher you go... The more a thought permeates your mind. (The more a thought bugs you lol.) I wont write exactly what it is, but if you are a decent human being... You'll feel/know it when you play/read. And then...! The end comes andddddddddd you actually get to make the choice I wanted to make since the first story I heard!!! Therefore it was an exciting experience for me and I felt like I did a good deed at the end of the day! Thanks you!!! :> :) =)

Easy Achievements, 100% / 5min.