Isorropia was an attempt at making a PvP only 2D top down retro pixel arena brawler. While the game was incorrectly launched on Steam in an incomplete state, the developer was unable to correctly list the game correctly as an "Early Access" product (or perhaps the developer sought to deliberately mislead gamers). Regardless, this is an Early Access game and must be treated as such. Unfortunately, it's also abandoned, the developers walked away from this flaming garbage pile 2 days after launching it.
It failed. SteamDB shows the game peaked at just over 100 players on the launch day, which is a pitiful number, and now the game has practically no players, with nobody even launching it for weeks at a time. It's dead. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
First up the game visuals are terrible, controls are locked, the overall quality here is woeful. A choice was made to use obsolete 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. Resolution is locked and can't be changed, there's no way to improve to woefully bad, lazy visuals. These flaws push this game far below minimum acceptable standards for PC.
Notably, the developer deliberately set out to insult PC gamers, their target audience. It's unclear why any developer would be so hostile to gamers, but this game has no KB+M support (despite being a PC game). The developer demands you must use a console peasant children's toy gamepad to play the game, even though this is on PC. This renders the game unplayable for most gamers, and is an incomprehensibly insulting decision.
PvP gamers have literally thousands of games to choose from, hundreds of AAA games that are either free or cost next to nothing. Games have to actually offer something if they want to compete for players time. Insulting the target audience as the developer did here unsurprisingly did tremendous harm.
The developers made the terrible mistake of launching a multiplayer only game in Early Access (and they couldn't even get that right). This is almost certain to kill the game. Most gamers will evaluate a game only once. If they do so when the game is incomplete, they will check it out, then abandon it (just like the developers did). When (IF) the game eventually does get around to release, there will be no players, because the developers burned the first impressions through their faulty Early Access experience. Players who saw the game and didn't like it because it was incomplete [i]do not come back[/i]. Multiplayer games must have a large population if they are to go "viral" and succeed, especially without single player content to fall back on. Releasing a multiplayer only game into early access kills the game population, and thus the game, before the game even launches.
The developers made the fatal, lazy mistake of believing that PvP, other players, would be an acceptable substitute for doing the difficult job of adding single player level design, storytelling, NPCs and other rich aspects of designed game content to the game. As a result of this choice by the developers, the game has little to no actual interactive game content. It's a little considered fact that the vast majority of PvP only, multiplayer only games [b]fail[/b]. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for doing the job of game developers and building a game filled with content. PvP only games must have a [b]huge[/b] player base for them to "go viral" and succeed. But with no single player experience to add lasting value to a game, the developers instead chose to bet against all odds that their game would "go viral" without any actual reason for players to want to play the game. Predictably, they lost this bet.
An additional note: As mentioned previously, the game only had just over 100 players at launch. Most failed games take at least a week for the player numbers to drop to zero, but here, the player numbers dropped to zero overnight. While this could be explained easily by the woeful quality and lazy implementation of the game, it's suspicious, given there's thousands of similar failed games on Steam that had better player counts for longer. Is it possible the developer used bots to fake a large player count at launch? Who knows. Anyway, dead, broken, absconded game. Not worth the download.
