Back To Hell is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. And this is so bad it's seriously a contender for one of the worst games on Steam, and with well over 8,700 reviews under my belt now, that's a pretty serious accolade. The things I have seen.... anyway.
This platformer looks like it was made in Adobe Flash or something, but it wasn't. It's got "adventure" game elements as you can pick up stuff and put things down. Comically this seems to have been made to be a mobile app because it's got control hotspots on the left and right of the screen for your thumbs to touch while you play this on your iPhone, but of course Apple or Google would never allow crap like this on their app stores.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
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.
As mentioned, this looks and feels like a mobile app (especially with the touch controls on either side of the screen), but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Back To Hell" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. 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 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Back To Hell 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, this is impossible to recommend.
