"Garshasp: Temple of the Dragon" is an older game from 2012. It's a venerable 12 years old at the time of this review. And it's bad, real bad. Not bad like your average amateur "indie" game is bad just because, well, amateur developers aren't professional developers. This is bad in an even worse way, because it was professionally developed, and it's still terrible.
It's a third person brawler and a sequel to an older but better Garshasp brawler, thankfully very short (but also weirdly short, at less than 2 hours). It's got comically bad writing and comically bad voice acting. I don't think there's any aspect of this game that was done well, or even beyond "mediocre", and people expect more from professional developers.
Anyway, let's go into the technical faults.
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 mid 2000s. 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.
Another defect in the game caused by the console-peasant-centric design is the intolerably bad camera controls. There's no effective mouselook, and control of the viewing angles is deliberately outside of reasonable control from the user.
This defect springs from the limitations of inferior console peasant children's toy gamepads, but on PC we don't have this limitation due to KB+M controls... however, the developer deliberately chose to arrogantly foist this handicap onto PC gamers. Out of spite, or laziness, it's unclear, regardless, once more console peasants and console devs have made gaming worse for everyone.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles. 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 11 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?
"Garshasp: Temple of the Dragon" has the farcical 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 "This War of Mine", "Civilization VI" or "Dishonored". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
