This is a genuinely, if badly made game from Russia (yes, not all games that come out of Russia are asset flips). But what we have here isn't great... yes, it looks like a "voxel racing game" but it's not really. In fact, it works more like one of those bridge building mobile apps where you draw a line to make a bridge or other structure, then hit "play" to see if the bridge works. The difference here is that instead of a bridge, you're given a map of a rally driving track and you need to draw a line that the driver of the car will follow.
Once in the "race" itself you do get a little interactivity, you can pull the handbrake on to slow the car, and you can use nitrous to get a speed boost. What fun. You know there's games on Steam where you actually get to drive the car, right?
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
For starters from my experience the game is fundamentally broken... it doesn't recognize that you finished the tutorial and so it doesn't unlock any of the levels, so you can only play the tutorial. Hard to ask people to spend money on a game that broken, so that's an immediate disqualifier.
The game features lazy low-polygon voxel "Minecraft"-like "art", making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. A lot of amateur developers see Minecraft's success and assume it's because it looks bad, not because it had unique and appealing game mechanics, and they try to emulate the success without understanding it. It also happens to be easy, and doesn't need any proper talent in terms of game development/graphic artists etc. That's why reviewers are faced with so many of these terrible games with confrontingly bad graphics. Developers must learn that Minecraft succeeded despite the bad graphics, not because of them.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. 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 I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. 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 DRAWER 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 flaws make this game fall far short of the professional standards we expect from a 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 all-time peak player number was [b]only 6 players[/b]. 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
DRAWER has the almost unethical price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
[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]
