[b][quote]Warning: Broken Game![/quote][/b]This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game crashes immediately when you try to launch it. The developers are aware of this defect and choose not to fix the problem.
"Colours of Magic: Aqua Teeter" is a broken mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The mobile app is just a simple physics puzzle game where you tilt your iPhone around to make fluid flow around a little board and collect. You can mix different colours to produce what is required to solve each puzzle level (on iPhone, as mentioned you can't do this on PC because the game is broken, but the developer still wants your money).
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the mobile app is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Colours of Magic: Aqua Teeter" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the tutorial, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this before it became unplayable. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time (when the peak occurred, the game is unplayable now). How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the mobile app? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state. This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.
The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the pathetically optimistic price of $1 USD for a mobile app they know is broken. Don't give it to them.
