[quote][b]Warning: Toxic Developer[/b]
The developer of Flappy Alien handed me an in-game ban (inconsequential as it is), presumably in retaliation for this factual review. Be warned that buying or playing games from this developer puts your Steam Account at risk.[/quote]
Flappy Alien is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Flappy Bird (Copyright Dong Nguyen, 2013). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Dong Nguyen against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
To describe the game in case you don't know what Flappy Bird is, Flappy Alien is yet another of several hundred, if not thousands of garbage low effort endless runners plaguing Steam. Like all endless/autorunners, you're moving and you can't stop. All you can do is avoid the obstacles coming at you in this incredibly shallow shovelware game.
But worse, of course, is that this is not only obvious copyright infringement, but it's also clearly a ripoff of someone's online tutorial... there's dozens of them to teach people how to make Flappy Bird games to try teach people how to use Unity to make games. One example is here: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvBiJ1oC9U]How To Make Flappy Bird In Unity - Complete Tutorial[/url]. Now, it's hard to say which of the many tutorials the developer has ripped off here, but it's highly likely they didn't even follow the tutorial, just downloaded the tutorial code and slapped some flipped assets on it.
If you take that into account, there's no way anyone should ever seriously consider buying this (and you can play Flappy Bird for free in browser or on mobile, so why pay money for it on Steam, seriously?)
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off.
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.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just pushing one button. 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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Flappy Alien has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for well, something to do with galactic horses, trivial to achieve, but less than 6 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
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 5 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Flappy Alien has the completely unrealistic cash grab 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.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Torchlight", the "Tomb Raider" remake or "Mass Effect 3". No pixelcrap asset flip is worth $5.
[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]
