Lucky me gets the dubious honour of warning gamers away from "Floathink".
Floathink is a mostly broken ClickTeam Fusion (ugh) based ripoff of Lunar Lander (copyright Atari Inc. 1979), only worse in all respects. Instead of just managing to land, you need to negotiate a 2D side view obstacle course, which is nigh on impossible [i]because the game is so badly broken the menu doesn't work properly[/i]. Basic testing is not an "option" for game "developers", even ones who can't work out how to use the no-code "anyone can use it" ClickTeam Fusion construction kit.
See, the developer, had he tested this, would have noticed that the mouse doesn't properly move around the game menu, the pointer is bugged and doesn't move with the mouse, so you sort of have to guess where the pointer really is if you want to click through the limited menu and start the game. It's honestly not worth the effort of bashing your head against the broken menu for the game to start it.
I guess we shouldn't be too surprised this is awful... all the other "games" from this developer are hentai asset flips.
From a technical perspective, even if you could get this to work, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. 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.
One of the important quality checks for any video game is the audio. The bare minimum of audio controls must be there, so the experience can be tailored. The audio and music must be of high quality. Bizarrely, Floathink doesn't even have any music at all. That's an immediately failure and yet another reason to avoid this game.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any 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 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Because the game is broken and unplayable for me, it may also not work for other gamers. This is a solid reason to approach this game with some scepticism.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Floathink 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[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]
