Letter-Setter is a free mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a paid product, as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The game is an ultra basic letter moving puzzle game, you swap letters on a Match-3 style board and instead of matching three gems or whatever, you match letters to form a word. That's all there is to this, it's surpassed by free browser games and other free mobile apps.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, 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 mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. 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.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
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 Letter-Setter 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 mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Letter-Setter didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the mobile app, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for using one of the puzzle powerups to clear the board (it's available right away), trivial to get, but less than 25 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the mobile app.
The poor quality of this mobile app is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the mobile app all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the mobile app. OUCH. 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 mobile app is to be expected.
So, should you buy this mobile app?
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $1 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are? Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
