Asteroids Extreme is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Asteroids (Copyright Atari Inc, 1979). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Atari Inc against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. The developer was so eager to breach every intellectual property law he could, he also decided to infinge on Atari's trademark as well. That'll go down well in court.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Asteroids Extreme is considerably worse than Asteroids.
The graphics here are some of the worst, laziest attempt at video game "art" I've ever seen. It's hard to suggest this game even has graphics. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, the kind that an infant child might be able to create in 5 minutes on MS Paint. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone.
Gameplay, control schema and everything else about this train wreck are equally awful.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ products on Steam?
The game is currently free, but the developers were charging money for it. Nothing speaks more to a developers belief in themselves and their product than making their game available for everyone without remuneration, but this is also in some ways an acknowledgement that the game failed to achieve any commercial success (unsurprising due to the quality issues). It's a shame in this case that the implementation is below the minimum standards a dedicated PC game should offer to enthusiasts. The quality here is simply too low for me to recommend, even for free.
