Searching for the term "platformer" on Steam gives you over 17,000 results... there's thousands and thousands of garbage tier platformers infesting Steam. "Catch the dustling" fits right into that category of retro 2D shovelware glutting the Steam store. Only a tiny number of those are any good, and this isn't one of them.
This is a simple and rather pointless Construct based precision/puzzle platformer from Russia. As we might expect from a developer that chooses a primitive, "no skill needed" construction kit like Construct 2, the quality of this is just garbage tier.
The platformer follows the plot of a scientist in a lab with weird dust creatures, but any effort expended on plot is totally wasted given how poor the technical delivery is.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded [i]despite[/i] looking crap, not [i]because[/i] they look crap.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2/Construct 3 game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
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 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Catch the dustling is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers.
[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]
