Hot steel

Hot steel is a poorly made 2D top down retro pixel/"hand drawn" wave survival brawler as you control some ninja guy in a pumpkin patch and you have to slash at various samey copy+pasted enemies that walk towards you mindlessly. It was made by dumping some badly drawn low resolution/pixel assets onto a crappy GameMaker Studio template. This is surely what the future of gaming is all about, what a time to be alive. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint style drawings (I won't deign to call these "illustrations"). It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result of these decisions. 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 controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is often used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Hot steel didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievments, 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 getting to the third level of the game (trivial to do!), and only around 37 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game, less than half the players. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. Hot steel is relatively cheap at $2 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.