Forgenator

Lucky me gets the dubious honour of being the first to review Forgenator (shouldn't that be "Forginator")? One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. I've played a few thousand games that have been significantly worse than this, but at the same time it's far from anything most gamers would be interested in (and the remarkably low player counts support that). Forgenator is a bit like one of those restaurant management platespinning type games, but I think it does better at giving players interesting things to do. You run around doing little jobs to fulfil orders making medieval/fantasy weapons, and sometimes the jobs are pretty exciting and dangerous... I think the developers gameplay video in the store page shows just how much variety there is in activities (it beats the crap out of the inexplicably popular Cook-Serve-Delicious games, that's for sure). In some ways that depth of game design is a bit of a shame because it was wasted on such a lacklustre technical delivery. There's a co-op focus to the game, so you need to co-ordinate with your friends to play this... I guess that's easier for the developer than making a compelling single player experience. I think that was one of the factors that deterred gamers. You can play single player but you're forced two control two characters anyway... that's never fun. Like I always say, if the only thing that makes a game fun is your friends, that just proves it's fun to spend time with your friends, and doesn't say much for the game at all. 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, 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. PC gamers will be insulted by the demand from the developer that a console peasant children's toy controller should be used, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for, and must never, under any circumstances dictate to gamers how their games are to be experienced. 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 all-time peak player number was only 4 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. Indeed, as a 4 player co-op game, if it only hit 4 players once, that's a staggeringly embarrassing figure. It only ever got played as intended [i]once[/i]. Ouch. That's gotta hurt. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Forgenator has the gamer gouging price of around $7 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 $7 asking price for this game could get you games like the "Tomb Raider" remake, "Outlast" or "Fallout 4". No pixelcrap is worth $7. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly. [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]