Carnage Cuisine

"Carnage Cuisine" is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Vampire Survivors (Copyright Poncle, 2021). 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. Worse, not only was this godawful ripoff of Vampire Survivors intellectually bankrupt, the developer couldn't finish it yet had all the time in the world to build garbage Steam Marketplace "NFTs" into the game. And they tried charging money directly for this, too. Guys, if it looks like a scam, and it smells like a scam... don't download it. Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, 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. "Carnage Cuisine" is considerably worse than Vampire Survivors. The developers abandoned this 1 year and 7 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening here. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $3 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. The grift and cash grabbing keeps getting worse... this product is hooked into Steams "Totally not NFTs" Community Marketplace/Inventory, which means you can buy and sell and trade "tokens" (fungible ones in this case) for real world money, and you can "earn" these tokens by playing the game. This is never done with the interests of gamers in mind, the "developer" behind this gets paid for every trade, and has presumbly also farmed up a bunch of the items to sell on the market, too. This kind of Steam abuse, combined with a minimum-viable-product non-game, does no service to gamers whatsoever. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 6 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict? Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.