Euler Wars

Euler Wars is marketed as being a space sim/flight sim... I guess it kinda qualifies. It does have a ripoff of Deep Space 9 in it, so we can hope CBS sues. Apart from that, this is an unusual specimen in the murky, shallow end of the Steam store, with an unusual premise. Your spaceship, which you can customise by plugging in various guns/shields/utilities etc is of the form of a geometric polyhedrons (you may be more familiar seeing these kinds of things in the form of Dungeons and Dragons dice and so on, like who hasn't played Baldur's Gate 3 by now?). You plug modules onto each face of the polyhedron. So yeah, this is trying to be a maths game. This is not making mathematics better, it's just making gaming worse. There are a couple of nice features here and the game is sincerely, if badly made, it's not an asset flip or a construction kit hack job. There's also some nice depth in the way you can choose to play the game, but nobody bothered. Why not? There's two areas where this derails fast and hard. First up, the visuals are laughably terrible. You do get customisable resolution, at least. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. Secondly, because the game is already severely handicapped by the godawfully bad, lazy visuals, it's also doing everything possible to deter anyone from playing it with the frankly craptastic control scheme. The developer even goes so far as to mention this in the sales blurb and the "how to play" section that the controls are difficult to use and the game is brutally hard... and coming from the people whose job it is to make sure the game has great, fun controls and is approachable by gamers, that's a little ironic to say the least. I can confirm the developers admission here that the game sucks to try to play. The upshot of the one-two punch of a bad looking game that sucks to play is that nobody played it. Surprising to nobody, I'm sure. 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. 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. Euler Wars 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. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/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.