HUNGER is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This particular "effort" from Russia is abandoned and incomplete, riddled with bugs, makes no sense as a game, and obviously isn't fun. A convoluted control mechanism forms the basis for an attempt to add some simple survival/adventure game elements to an otherwise extremely tired and generic "soldier on an island" borefest.
The game was abandoned roughly 3 years after launch and hasn't been updated in 5 years. 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.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
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.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
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 most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Black Smerch has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
HUNGER didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, 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 "Play game", starting the game, trivial to get, but less than 13 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 13 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 didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People 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 little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
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 110,000+ games on Steam?
HUNGER has the pathetically optimistic price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
