Gatling Gears is an ancient console (PS3) game from 2011. It's a whopping 13 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware.
The game does work, and while it's looking a bit dated it did have AAA production value on the visuals so it's not exactly an eyesore. This game has you controlling a little cartoony mecha/robot and blowing up cutesy looking tanks and things... kind of like they ripped off the art style for Metal Slug. The kicker is more just the shallow, consoleqsue gameplay isn't offering a great deal for gamers, especially when coupled with the console centric design and implementation defects.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
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.
Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Gatling Gears didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the tutorial, trivial to get, but less than 24 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Gatling Gears is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $10 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
