Brutalism22 is a, well, it's different, I guess. Different doesn't mean good. It's a short, first-person, adventure/walking simulator with exploration elements. You take on the role of a worker in a Ukrainian city during a war, and the story involves escaping with a dog and a neighbor's child. You are limited to walking and exploring the environment, encountering monsters and navigating various locations. It's trying to be more "art" than game, I guess, and it does a bad job at both.
The gameplay is sluggish and tiresome, you move along at a plodding pace, which is only really okay if the visuals in the game are so awesome you don't mind soaking it all in, but wow, the graphics here are phoned in.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
We can say with great certainty that this game is not an asset flip. This is because the assets are of such poor quality that no self respecting asset creator or artist would publish them under any circumstances.
Certainly, nobody likes to see asset recycling, stock assets are intended to be used as placeholders until superior assets can be created by the developer, but when we get what's worse than either stock assets being flipped or professional assets, it's a reason for gamers to go out of their way to avoid the product.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
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.
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 3 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 130,000 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 130,000+ games on Steam?
Brutalism22 has the total ripoff price of around $4 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 $4 asking price for this game could get you games like "Fallout 4", "Hellblade: Sensua's Sacrifice" or the "Tomb Raider" remake. 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]
