RPG Maker strikes again!
Darklands: The Chapters is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
This is a little different from your Warfare/Andorlea Eastern Bloc RPG Maker asset flips, as this asset flip was copy + pasted from Portugal. Way to go, Portugal. There's a little variation from the usual fantasy anime fanclub fan fiction, there's a couple of sci-fi assets flipped in, and a weird plot about a cowboy hacking things, which seems improbable to me. Best I can guess is the developer watched a lot of Cowboy Bebop and got so confused they dumped an RPG Maker pixelcrap asset flip onto Steam. And so here we are.
There's no English translation for the game, it's all in Portuguese, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal.
There's supposed to be additional content for the game in the form of new chapters, which means, first up, this is an incomplete game (another reason not to buy it), and also, it's probably abandoned, because no additional content seems to have been added since launch 5 months ago.
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.
Even worse, before I ran up the game to check it out today, nobody had played this in 5 months... SteamDB showed the peak player count of one player happened 5 months ago! There's 12 million gamers on Steam... for a game to be this completely unseen by the equivalent of an entire nation worth of gamers is truly remarkable... that's just how bad this is!
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Darklands: The Chapters 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. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 11,000 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]
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer breaches Valve guidelines just to insult a paying customer, blurting out a weird insult in badly broken English. This is embarrassing and frankly sad, but it does show the developers deplorable attitude, which explains how such garbage arrived on Steam as a paid product. The developer attacks me personally for being "boring", but the facts speak for themselves.
My review has more "helpful" marks than his entire RPG Maker asset flip had peak players... remember, this game clocked it at only one concurrent player at any given time. What a complete and utter joke. But he has the gall to insult me, and breach Valve guidelines to do so.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this RPG Maker asset flip to anyone.
