Death Runner is yet another of several hundred, if not thousands of garbage low effort endless runners plaguing Steam. This one is notable for just how bad and incredibly lazy it is... the developer didn't even know how to do animations or anything complicated, so your "character" is just a cube. I've never seen such laziness in all my life. This is yet another reason why Valve needs QA for Steam.
In terms of gameplay, like all endless/autorunners, you're moving and you can't stop. All you can do is avoid the obstacles coming at you in this incredibly shallow shovelware game.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 110,000+ games on Steam.
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.
One of the driving elements of this shovelware game is "achievement spam", that is to say the game features a ridiculously large number of trivial/automatically granted achievements, 1300 of them, in fact. It's a damning indictment for this shovelware that people only bought it for easy achievements, and not because it has any serious merit as a real 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 all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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?
Death Runner is relatively cheap at $1 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 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
