Astro Joust is an unabashed ripoff of the 1980's arcade game, Joust (copyright Atari Interactive/Warner Brothers Interactive, 1982). The only appreciable difference is the emus were re-skinned to be astronauts, which makes even less sense than the emus, and it's not enough differentiation to put the "developers" of this garbage out of risk of legal trouble should Warner Brothers decide to enforce their intellectual property rights. It goes without saying, but the unwritten rule of stealing someone else's game concept is to try to at least do slightly better than the intellectual property these "developers" are ripping off for profit.
Gameplay itself is just Joust. You bounce around a 2D retro pixel single screen arena and try to hit other [strike]emus[/strike] astronauts on the head. You can "fly" by mashing the jump button, possibly the inspiration for the crap mobile app, Flappy Bird. Whoever is higher altitude when two [strike]emus[/strike] astronauts run into each other wins.
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.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any 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 all-time peak player number was only 4 players. The comical part about this is the game features 4 player multiplayer... and, making the very big assumption these people were all playing together, this means the game only ever once had enough players for it to be played as intended. You can't make this stuff up, it's a joke. 4 players 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Astro Joust is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the risk this game will disappear overnight if Warner Brothers hears about it, this is impossible to recommend.
