My review for HANGMAN II is going to be almost exactly like my review for HANGMAN, from the same developer. This is because HANGMAN II is a direct copy + paste of the previous game, itself just a ClickTeam Fusion construction kit job, with slightly different MS-Paint "art" and the small handful of word puzzles to solve has been changed about. When developers copy + paste entire games with very little changes, this does no service to gamers. It's just pollution, no different to the garbage produced by Russian asset flippers. And it's harmful. It gives indie devs a bad name. It makes it harder for gamers to find sincerely made, real games. And it makes it harder for indie devs to find an audience for their games.
HANGMAN II is, from what I can tell, a "joke" game, trying to be edgy. Yes, it's the old classroom game, "hangman" where you must guess a word by choosing the correct letters that compose it, and if you choose the wrong letter the man gets closer to being hanged. They made it "edgy" by choosing dark words like mentioning C19, murder, etc etc. There's only 30 levels, and given you can play hangman games better than this for free in a web browser, the expectation that anyone should pay for this on Steam is just an insult.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
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?
HANGMAN II 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.
[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]
