[quote][b]Warning: Developer Fraud[/b][/quote]
In an act of brazen theft and fraud, the "developer" revoked all keys to the "Rhythm Knights" game sold through third party sites like DIG, keeping the money taken from DIG but removing the game from paying customers accounts. This is essentially theft through hostile, fraudulent action on behalf of this unethical developer. There's no guarantee the developer won't repeat this act of theft on other titles too, including this one.
Under no circumstances should anyone by a game from this con artist and copyright thief.
Edit: As promised, here is the full review for this game.
Frog Ball Rerolled is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Super Monkey Ball (Copyright Sega, 2001). 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 Sega against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
This is from Darren Larson, who is a famous gamer hostile copyright infringer... this isn't the first game copyright he's ripped off, he made a very bad ripoff of Sonic the Hedgehog with "Ortheo", and he stole the character designs from Castle Crashers for his Rhythm Knights Guitar Hero ripoff (the one he revoked keys for in an attempt to scam gamers out of a game they paid for). Now, reviews are about the games, no matter how toxic the developers are, but I think if you're here on Steam trying to decide whether to buy this game or not, the developers background and gamer hostile history is an important factor when making your decision.
Because the developer has revoked game keys and otherwise tried to attack gamers who bought his copyright infringing games, there's no telling whether the same will happen here... the developer has broken trust with consumers. If you buy this, you're putting your money at risk.
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. Frog Ball Rerolled is considerably worse than Super Monkey Ball.
And this is a very, very weak ripoff indeed... with graphics worse than the 2001 game (it's 2024 now...), worse gameplay, and a frog in the ball instead of a monkey. Yeah, that will be enough to keep Sega's legal division away from this. Not.
From a technical perspective, 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 lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
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 2 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?
Frog Ball Rerolled 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. And, as mentioned, because the developer has revoked keys in an attempt to steal from gamers before, they may choose to do so again. Don't put your money at risk.
