Asteroad

Asteroad is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers on Steam, lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere, and I'm lucky enough to write the first English review for this Japanese amateur indie game. One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made, from the gameplay through to the hand crafted game assets (refreshing to see). I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. This puzzle platformer has a unique premise... you connect the stars above your head using the mouse, to create a structure. You then drop this structure onto the ground where it helps you solve various platforming puzzle problems. This is certainly a unique idea, but I don't feel like it's the revolution that platformers needed for them to become relevant in the era of 3D immersive gaming. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. 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. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Asteroad didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for NEW_ACHIEVEMENT_1_0... that's right, I guess the developer didn't know how Steam achievements work, added an achievement anyway, and couldn't work out how to change the name or add a description. It's also unclear what this is for, but less than 18 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 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 game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Asteroad has the preposterous price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect", "Ark: Survival Evolved" or "Civilization VI". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. [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]

ナレーションは女の子の日本語音声。画面上部にある星をつないで橋などを作って先に進んでいくスタイルのゲーム。ゲームパッドでもプレイ出来るが、図形を作るのにはマウスを使う方が良い。ボリュームは少なめだが落ち着いた綺麗なBGMでなかなか良い雰囲気のゲームだと思う。フルスクリーンで起動するがalt+Enterでウィンドウモード（1920x1080）に出来る。

You can see that someone wanted to do something great, but sadly they failed at it. The idea isnt bad, but thats about it. Its a quarter-baked 2d platformer, the achievements DO NOT work. Im on a quest of at least trying every game in my library, of which I got plenty from all kinds of cheap mass-bundles, others I bought directly, yet others from sites like nivqgames. So please dont judge me for owning this title in the first place :D If you are interested in my journey, check out my other reviews :)