Ground Pounders is a somewhat uncertain attempt to make a hex grid turn based strategy game combined with a deckbuilder... and this lack of clear vision from the developer permeates all aspects of the game. As a cardgame, this makes a poor turn based strategy game... and as a turn based strategy game, this is a terrible deckbuilder. We really have the worst of both worlds here. The game is set in the lacklustre and uninteresting "Sword of the Stars" universe, which you'll be passingly familiar with as the developers shove this into every single game bundle and discount they can manage, either to try scrape a few more cents out of a franchise on life support, or just in the hopes that someone buying a game bundle will see one of their games and then suddenly everything will "Go viral". Spoiler: Nothing went viral.
The technical implementation is really weak here, I'll get into the specifics later in this review, but the point is that the depth of the game is lost on the majority of gamers who are understandably turned away from the almost browser-esque graphics. If you did invest time in the game, which I certainly don't recommend, you'll still be disappointed. Unfortunately, most piles of rubbish on Steam aren't hiding a pot of gold underneath their ugly veneers, and this is no exception.
One of the big problems here is in terms of the general design and the way it was designed to look and feel like a boardgame, instead of a PC game. There's two aspects of any game. The mechanics of the game, and the interface that the players have with that mechanic. Poker, for example, is about randomly generated hands that players get, and the interface is the randomly drawn paper cards. If you keep the random hand, but remove the physical cards, the game still works, but it's streamlined, more pure. That's video gaming. The best video games put the players directly against the core game mechanic. We don't love games because of their interfaces, we love them for their mechanics. The less that the interface gets in the way, the better. So here, we have a boardgame/cardgame, and the focus of the developers has clearly been to keep, and emulate the annoying physical interface, without bothering to improve on the mechanics or put the players closer to them. As a result of this hamfisted decision, the game is clunky and annoying to play compared to games that were designed from scratch to be PC games.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. 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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Ground Pounders has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the tutorial (and you can't really play the game properly without doing that), but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. 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.
Ground Pounders has the utterly unrealistic 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. If you are looking for a good hex grid turn based strategy, the go-to is Hearts of Iron, try that.
