Cubebam is more Russian shovelware from the Russian asset flip scammers at Piece of Voxel, and I have the unfortunate duty of being the first to warn gamers about yet another scam infesting Steam.
Piece Of Voxel have shown a repeat pattern of unethically dumping other people's work onto Steam as a cheap, nasty cash grab, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. Here's some examples so you can see for yourself:
[list]
[*] "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1660460]Hoples[/url]" = [url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/characters/pixel-adventure-1-155360]Pixel Adventure 1[/url] developed by Pixel Frog
[*] "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1547820]Top Truck Driver[/url]" = [url=https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/5820/hill-racing-template-gms1-2]Hill Racing Template[/url] developed by Janko Knez
[*] "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1655880]Kings and Pigs[/url]" = [url=https://pixelfrog-assets.itch.io/kings-and-pigs]Kings and Pigs[/url] developed by Pixel Frog
[*] "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787640]Kings and Pigs Prequel[/url]" = [url=https://pixelfrog-assets.itch.io/kings-and-pigs]Kings and Pigs[/url] developed by Pixel Frog
[*] "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1587940]DuelVox Max Quality[/url]" = [url=https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/western-desert-town]Western Desert Town[/url] developed by KK Design
[/list]
Cubebam is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Angry Birds (Copyright Rovio, 2009). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Rovio against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Cubebam is considerably worse than Angry Birds.
The game is still being developed, but development is slow enough that the game appears to be headed to Development Hell. While there's still time before the game reaches the developers committed deadline to complete the game, the Russian "developer" has apparently already abandoned this, as it hasn't been updated since prior to the Early Access launch... there's zero progress. There's no reliable indication the game will ever be completed, which is another reason for gamers to avoid this. It's important to remember that only about 25% of Early Access games ever get completed... the vast majority of Early Access games are abandoned and all money taken from gamers is never refunded. Early Access games are a huge risk and in general should be avoided.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it 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 game 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.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. 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 Cubebam 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.
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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Cubebam 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 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
Despite being Early Access and for all intents and purposes abandoned, the asset flippers pushing this garbage are discounting it and selling it through bundles... trying to scam as many roubles as possible from an unfinished mobile app that they've dumped onto Steam like so much trash.
[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]
Don't reward asset flip scammers like Piece of Voxel. Stay away.
