Fragile Equilibrium

can't believe the bgm is so soft and classical for this sci-fi shooting game but it is funny , the reflective crystal and imprisonment bomb are interesting only four levels , hope more updates later and the final of level 4 is hell , hardly to survive

Fragile Equilibrium is yet another of literally hundreds of amateur 2D retro arcade bullet hell/shoot 'em ups infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one is a free student project, which explains why it's free, but doesn't otherwise impact the most important question about any game, which is whether it's worth playing or not. Shoot 'em ups an old and dead genre, and it doesn't serve the interests of gamers for there to be yet another "me too" entry. In this case some elements have been added like some quasi-existential navelgazing text before each level, and a couple of other bits like the screen being destroyed as you play, creating deadzones that damage you. This is not what Galaga needed to get to break the 21st century. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features simple, fairly basic 2D visuals, and while some effort went into them, and they don't look bad exactly, they don't look great, either. In the 3D era of gaming, that kicked off in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D GPUs like the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, phoning in the graphics like this isn't going to win any awards or appeal to enthusiast PC gamers. 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. This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. 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 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, especially given the game is free, 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? The game is completely free, as it's a non-professionally developed student project. It's difficult to say it's appropriate for colleges and schools to publish every bit of work their students produce (whether the students pass the course or not), because this is of questionable value for the most important people in the gaming industry - the gamers. Regardless in many ways, even if this is a student project, it's better than much of the pollution on Steam (asset flips and other shovelware/cash grabs). Unfortunately because this is not a professionally developed game intended for gamers, and because of the defects outlined above, it's impossible to recommend this.