Evopollution

Evopollution is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. It looks and feels like it's 30 years old, rather than 10. It's also kind of pointless. Sure, this looks like an interesting city/factory building game, but it's not. It's more of a number incrementer/idler than a builder/tycoon game. It's a somewhat weak and directionless effort to spread an environmentally themed message, badly. The aim is to make a million buckaroos, and the way you do that is to plonk down various energy producing tiles. Easy. The problem is that these tiles make pollution which leads to the destruction of nearby trees and eventually your own buildings, too, so you learn that it's better to avoid heavy pollution... and I'm afraid to say that's it, that's the entirety of the game. There's nothing else to it. 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. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Evopollution has the comically over-optimistic price of around $5 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. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.