They are among us.
Every now and then a game comes along that's so incredibly bad that gamers are left scratching their heads and wondering if the game was made bad deliberately on purpose as a joke, so gamers can point and laugh at it, or indeed if the game was genuinely and sincerely made by someone so incompetent they couldn't see just how utterly bad the product is and decide to shove it into Steam Direct because they seriously think it's good enough to launch.
That's happening right now, and it's called "Classic Home Invasion". And the developers behind games such as this are among us today. Hiding in plain sight. You might even walk past one on the street. You wouldn't even know who they are or what they aren't capable of. They don't know either.
To be kinder than this game deserves, this could be generously described as a top/side view adventure game with an alien abduction theme. You go home, go to bed, get abducted by aliens, who mess with you so badly that you wake up and create "Classic Home Invasion" and publish it on Steam Direct. I cannot stress that, despite having reviewed literally thousands of bad faith asset flip games, mobile app scams, and everything inbetween, this is truly one of the most badly games ever made, from incoherent controls, clipping, movement, graphical assets... there's not a thing about this game that doesn't suck. It really is that bad.
In the interests of thoroughness, here's the results of the standard gamut of tests every game gets put through before I can decide whether or not it's recommendable.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint style drawings I've ever hurt my eyes on. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result of these decisions.
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.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
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 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 110,000 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 110,000+ games on Steam?
Classic Home Invasion is relatively cheap at $3 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. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[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]
