Edit: This is a "home grown" asset flip... it's a reskin of the developers earlier garbage, "Frogvival"... wtf.
Croaktopia is an unusual (and completely failed) attempt to make a frog themed 2D retro pixel survival crafting game. This survival adventure game set in a forest under siege by a corrupt construction company. You play as one of four frogs, tasked with farming, cooking, crafting weapons, and defending your village. None of this is implemented remotely well.
The elements are there, sure, in very, very basic states, with poor animations, terrible menus, and of course, hideous, sloppy, lazy pixelcrap "art" instead of proper visuals. It was a complete and utter failure... I've seen more successful RPG Maker asset flips that were slapped out in the space of 3 hours by high school kids (I don't recommend those, either, just pointing out the enormity of failure here, explaining why others ignored this and you should too).
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
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.
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?
Croaktopia has the ridiculous, laughable price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $4 asking price for this game could get you games like "Shadow Warrior", "Killing Floor 2" or "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel". No pixelcrap is worth $4. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
[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]
