[quote][b]Warning: Developer Fraud[/b]
In an act of brazen theft and fraud, the "developer" revoked all keys to the "Fantasy Fighters" game sold through third party sites like DailyIndieGame, keeping the money taken from those resellers but removing the game from paying customers accounts. This is essentially theft through hostile, fraudulent action on behalf of this unethical developer. There's no guarantee the developer won't repeat this act of theft on other titles too.
Under no circumstances should anyone by a game from this con artist and thief.[/quote]
Historic Fighters was a really crap 2D side view turn based combat game, essentially a ripoff of the combat from Heroes of Might and Magic without any of the strategy/world component, it's just 4 units fighting another 4 units. The units are all badly imbalanced so some teams are outright better than others... game design here was frankly stupid.
The developer pulled this from Steam but not before doing the bizarre and unethical move of renaming the game to "Fantasy Fighters", charging $5 USD for it... which would be bad enough but they also blanked the Steam manifest for Fantasy Fighters so if you pay them $5 you don't get any game. Borderline criminal, if you ask me, definitely some kind of scam.
If you happen to get a key for this (it does appear in nasty shovelware bundles from time to time), you'll find that from a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Historic Fighters" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
It's good that the developer removed this from Steam.
