Crafting in Berxley

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote] Another attempt to get Steam gamers to pay amateur developers for AI slop, this time we get a glorified mobile app, made with AI slop, on Steam, with a price tag. The game itself is a medieval themed point and click/drag and drop iPhone finger swiper where you hit various scenarios that make you play a "crafting" minigame. The game itself is a basic kind of match-3 meets Doodle God "crafting" thing where you drag three things into a "constructor" and you get a material from it that you then use to buy yourself into more iterations of the might-as-well-be-a-phone-game AI slop experience. Did I mention this is mostly just AI slop? From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" looking AI slop instead of genuinely and sincerely created game assets. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating real game assets or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision. AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here. You can always spot lazy shovelware when the developer doesn't even bother including basic options like customisable display settings, graphics tweaks, or control remapping. In this case, the developer [i]did not include a settings menu at all.[/i] It's obvious this is a lazy, minimum viable product cash grab. Because of this, the controls can't be customised at all, which will frustrate many players, but more seriously it can render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers, or anyone on an AZERTY or other international keyboard layout. No settings menu means there's also no option to change the resolution and no graphics settings. There's no way to guarantee this runs at your monitor's native resolution, and no way to fix it if it doesn't run smoothly and no way to improve the poor visual quality. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes Crafting in Berxley might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. Those technical flaws drag this game well below the minimum quality standards expected of a 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? Crafting in Berxley is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere. AI models are trained on copyrighted intellectual property without permission from the owners. Using AI slop in a published product should be seen as supporting these copyright violations. [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]

This would be a great game if it wasn't for the total lack of how to play. There is a tutorial, but you will need to memorize it before starting. Since these are timed events, mistakes will be made. There is way too much to be discovered in the beginning and the entire time, timers are running. You will lose quickly. It only took me a half hour to learn that everything must be perfect or you'll get nowhere fast. Not sure if I'll come back to this quite yet.

For the low price, this game is quite fun, once you figure out what you have to do. There's a tutorial, but it's just a text dump, and you won't ever see it again once you skipped through it. Some things are also never explained, like how to get quest items. They seem to be the very same items you already get/use, but they never seem to count for your quests (except coal for some reason). Annoyingly, this game uses timers that do not continue while offline, and there seems to be absolutely no reason for them to exist anyway. There's also a weird mechanic involving gems, which are scarcely available but feel rather integral to the game. These are mobile game mechanics which have no business in a PC game. While I do recommend the game, it's mostly because there's no "maybe" rating here. If you like to find out everything yourself, this game would fit the bill, but be prepared for frustration.