Grave-Queen is a best described as a complete disaster, and certainly, an utter waste of the $100 the developer incinerated dumping this into Early Access via Steam Direct. What's happened here is someone got their hands on Unreal's third person template and mucked around with for what looks like about a weekend to try create some kind of anime(?) themed third person shooter/brawler (shouldn't be that hard, the third person template makes this trivial enough), but they couldn't work out how to do it. The result is a complete train wreck, and the train that wrecked here was the flaming dumpster fire express straight out of Desmoine.
It's a minimalist/neon/low poly third person brawler that barely works... the config menus don't work, the sounds aren't mapped properly (so when you attack it fires off like 5,000 of the "attack" sound all at once, risking serious ear damage from the noise)... zero polish, zero testing.
When someone creates something this awful, their usual next step is to take their PC out to the backyard, dig a very deep hole for it, cover over it with cement, and never speak of it again. Here, however, not only was the first instinct to publish this on Steam in the absolutely broken and horrific state it was in, but to slap a HUGE price tag on it and sell it through DailyIndieGame bundles as if it was a complete product.
This is so horribly bad that I would much rather play a Russian asset flip crypto miner. I've written over 11,000 Steam reviews, I've played more games than any other living being, and even so, few games are so badly made that they're this offensive to me.
So uh... what's wrong with it, exactly?
The game was abandoned roughly 3 months after launch and hasn't been updated in over a year. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
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.
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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount and selling keys to the game from third party key resellers. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Grave-Queen has the total ripoff price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect Andromeda", "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" or "Rise of the Tomb Raider". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[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]
This game is possibly one of the worst games ever made. May God have mercy on the developers soul.
