Demon Truck is a 2D retro pixel arcade shoot 'em up with a difference. It's massively dumbed down to the point it's just a two button clicker that might as well be a mobile app, except if it was, it would be overshadowed by far superior mobile apps. And yet somehow this is on Steam. Oh yeah, Steam Direct, $100 and Valve will take any garbage.
So this looks like a shmup but it's not really, you can't move. Right click boosts your truck so you can smash obstacles (and acts a shield), and left clicking shoots. There's some upgrades but that's kind of meaningless bling considering how incredibly shallow the game is.
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.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Demon Truck didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for defeating 666 enemies, not that difficult to get considering there's dozens of things to kill on screen all the time, and your "truck" auto-aims, but less than 26 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
The poor quality of this game is also 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 8 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Demon Truck is massively overpriced at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. If you're looking for a decent shmup on Steam, try Sine Mora.
