lil' Sherman is a low poly hybrid third person vehicle shooter and tower defense game. Gameplay consists of driving a "chibi" miniature tank around, shooting at waves of enemies, and building towers. Refreshingly, there's a nice upgrade path for various parts of your tank and so on. This really does seem like a genuine attempt to make a game, and thus deserves a fairly in-depth review.
Along with the welcome upgrade path, you've got a decent array of towers you can choose from, and most importantly the way the tank handles is pretty good, making the game somewhat fun to play... something often overlooked by amateur developers. Overall the game seems like it should have some potential, but there's flaws, too, deep enough that they prevented this from being the slam dunk it might have been.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. This is most certainly one of the things that discouraged gamers. The low poly graphics look like a throwback, and yet strangely cartoony enough that this looks like a mobile app. PC gamers enjoy neither.
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.
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 this 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.
If the game had been made to look like a PC game, the general public reception would have been a very different story. Or perhaps this is just a case of a developer accidentally launching on Steam after getting it confused with Google Play... I can tell you, this happens far too often, to the point it's embarrassing for the amateur game developer "indie" movement.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. That's right, only 4. This is a pitiful enough number, and now, 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, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is remarkable, but also to be expected. This complete and utter rejection of the game from gamers should be a keen information point for anyone considering buying shovelware like this. Gamers just didn't take this seriously, and for good reason.
On the less ethical, and somewhat disappointing side, we can see the developer is trying to use Steam to advertise and push the sale of speculative NFTs... this absolutely isn't okay, especially given Valve's zero tolerance policy on NFTs... the only thing keeping this on Steam is the lack of direct NFT integration into the game. It's disappointing when developers incinerate all community goodwill by behaving in a shady manner, and this very likely has influenced the general public response to the game and overall rejection as SteamDB demonstrates.
lil' Sherman is relatively cheap at $3 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. If you want a good action tower defense, once more the old stalwarts, the Sanctum series and the Orcs Must Die series are vastly superior to this, so do check them out.
