Dish Life: The Game is a free mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... this free mobile app has been dumped on Steam as a paid product, a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The game is an evangelical educational game where you run a science lab growing stem cells, learn something about science, and play a somewhat shallow, tedious tycoon game at the same time. And that's something about science, it's often an incredibly tedious, repetitious effort. It's important, but it's not fun, that's why they have to pay scientists to do it. This doesn't translate well to a game, and the game here is as dry as sand in a desert.
There's a lot of problems here and some highly questionable behaviour from the developers, one of which is apparently the University of Cambridge, who should bloody well know better, but apparently they don't. This game was designed to evangelise and educate, but to prevent people from actually engaging in this, they've got a ridiculous price tag on it (on PC). I guess the science gig isn't working out so well for these guys and they need to scam PC gamers into paying for free mobile apps to make ends meet. This poor attitude pervades the low quality of this mobile app.
This is not making stem cell education better, it's just making gaming worse.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no options to change the resolution for the mobile app or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this mobile app is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this mobile app will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality mobile phone graphics.
The mobile app features simple, paper cutout style 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps or Flash games. 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 University of Cambridge, ladies and gentlemen.
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.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this mobile app 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 2 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 mobile app is to be expected.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality mobile app this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $4 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile game just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are?
[b]Warning:[/b] This mobile app behaves as spyware and collects "telemetry" and personally identifying information. While there is an option to disable this, there's no guarantee that will work. The developers included this to try to spy on as many gamers as possible. The developers will make the unverifiable claim that this data isn't personally identifying, of course that's BS as they're collecting IPs and all kinds of other information about gamers, when combined with other profiling data this can 100% identify an individual. They say it's for "QA" purposes but there's no guarantee they're not profiling you or selling your data to third parties as they spy on you. Should you trust them? Of course not... if they had any concerns about user safety and privacy, [i]they wouldn't have built spyware into their mobile app and turned it on by default![/i]. There's simply no reason to trust them and gamers should avoid this mobile app because of this unacceptable privacy invasion. The University of Cambridge, ladies and gentlemen.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this mobile app as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the mobile app (to date). Until this status changes, this mobile app 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 free mobile app.
