Cherry Island is a bunch of Unity assets thrown in a blender and dumped on Steam unceremoniously by Adrien Maxime Jeanneret. At face value this might look like some kind of story driven/botmatching militaristic FPS, but really, it's a massive headache that makes you wonder why Valve doesn't put in some quality control.
Valve says we should try to write what we like about a game when writing a review, and this is often very difficult, because there's thousands of games on Steam, because Valve allows anyone with $100 to dump anything that runs (and sometimes things that don't) on Steam... and there's also no quality control. So it turns out the vast majority of games on Steam really are garbage. It's true, Valve makes about 98% of their income from about 2% of the games on the platform, so that should help people see what's going on with the rest of the games that don't make money.
But here goes... while this is mostly an asset flip, I think it's not a malicious one, I think the developer genuinely wanted to try to be a game developer and just didn't know how, which is why we have this Frankenstein's monster of Unity assets instead. I think the developer had a strong vision and they put a lot of work into this asset flip.
And Unity assets abound, there's elements from [url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/-7593]Advanced Sniper Starter Kit[/url] and [url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/game-toolkits/-106748]Ultimate FPS Toolkit[/url] for starters. But unlike most asset flippers making a cash grab, they've been re-arranged enough to try to make a separate, distinct game. Now, I know Unity Asset Store is intended to help amateur developers who lack the budget and skills to create their own assets bypass that... but after writing over 7,000 game reviews (and playing over 7,000 terrible games), I've learned an important lesson that gamers should know. It turns out that when a game developer isn't capable, that is, they lack the skill and talent to create high quality game assets, it turns out they also lack the skill and talent to do the rest of game development. 7,000+ games, more than anyone else on the planet, I think, and I've never seen a game with flipped assets that was any good.
Cherry Island is a pretty good example of this. While a lot of effort does seem to have gone into this, hard work doesn't guarantee results. Like cutting down a Californian Redwood with a teaspoon. It's a lot of hard work, but you might not even succeed. It's the resultant quality that matters. If GTA:V was made in a weekend by two guys and half a bottle of scotch, it would still be one of the best games ever made (Rockstar made billions from it!). If, on the other hand, Rockstar had 500 people working for 10 years on a game, and the result was Cherry Island, it would still be crap.
Why is it crap? Well, the game engine in use, and I know Unity is capable of much better, isn't well optimised or polished at all... it's clunky, movement is sluggish, the guns are positioned weirdly. It's nice the developer included vehicle driving as well, but again, that's clunky too. The Unity assets in use here aren't the best, either, the game looks baaaad. And not just because of the laughable lens flare effect. Actually the funniest part of the game has to be the text-to-speech for all the dialogue. All in all this is a disaster of epic proportions.
So the developer had a great vision for Cherry Island, but didn't have the capability to make that vision a reality. There's no value for gamers here (especially not for the rather optimistic $5 USD price tag). While we all smile and nod politely for amateur/indie developers, if you really want to build a house, the best way is not to get a bunch of bricks and wander off into the desert and try bashing them together until a mansion appears... the best way is to join a construction company and get a whole big team of people who know what they're doing to get the job done. I hope that Adrien Maxime Jeanneret can go on to join such a great team where hard work can be focused on quality results.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]
The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
I refrained from posting detail from SteamDB in my review, even while this information is often pertinent, to avoid embarrassing the developer, because I felt they were trying to be sincere. Their response here demonstrates that isn't the case, and this is much more of a cash grab than a genuine attempt at game development, so in some ways my review was perhaps inaccurate, as the developers poor attitude contracts the apparent intention I presented in my review. I was certainly wrong when I suggested the developer might be able to find employment as an actual developer.
Cherry Island was a complete and utter failure overwhelmingly rejected by gamers, who can smell an asset flip a mile away. Pathetically, the game only ever had a peak concurrent player count of 2 players... less players than you would actually need to adequately test the game launched properly! The game never recovered from this lofty peak of two people playing it at the same time, and now literally months go by before any player will launch it (and then presumably delete it). This is the biggest failure I've seen on Steam.
The developer seems to have me confused with a Valve employee. I am in no way able to block this garbage from Steam, indeed, Valve has no quality control whatsoever, which is why this game exists. It's an absolute fact here that Valve made more money from the $100 entry fee than they would have from game sales, because as SteamDB shows, nobody wanted or played this trash. Facts, hard to argue with. Valve relies on the community and their honest reviews of games to inform gamers. Reviews like this one.
The developer feels the art assets they bought/pirated from other developers are decent, that's a matter of opinion, but look at the screenshots and judge for yourself... oh, gamers already did. Back to SteamDB for a hard look at the facts.
The developer demands that they are entitled to present this garbage to gamers. So what right do they have to object to factual reviews when their inadequacy and failure as a developer is held up to scrutiny? None, whatsoever. The developer should be embarrassed that they managed to take all these assets from actual, real developers, and still not manage to put together any kind of playable game out of it.
Nothing in the developers pointless response changes the quality of their game or alters the fact that this is literally one of the worst games on Steam, a fact supported by the data from SteamDB. My review stands unaltered, but I thank the developer for reminding me to inform gamers just how severely this game was rejected by the gaming community.
