Line/Dash

Line/Dash is a minimalist 2D "line drawing" action/reflexes game. It's very shallow and comes across as shovelware, although the developer seems to have delusions of grandeur and describes this as a toolset to make "interactive 2D art exhibitions", which is a lot like saying bullcrap is wonderful because it helps roses grow... but at the end of the day it's just something that comes out of a bulls rear end. A bit like that commentry from the developer. Anyway, what is this? Well, apart from being shovelware trash, it's a minimalist 2 button action game where squares move across the screen from right to left. You have three lives and lose a life each time a square hits the left hand side of the screen. I certainly feel like I lost three lives playing this garbage. How can you stop the squares, then? This is where it gets back. Click the mouse to make an arrow headed line drop from the top of the screen, click the other mouse button to make the line turn 90 degrees and head to the right. If it hits a square, you're saved from that square. The game challenge is all about timing when to turn the arrow to the right... and here's the problem. The developer didn't bother testing the game at all... there's completely horrible input lag, probably around half a second or more... this makes it absolutely impossible to do any reflexive timing, the game simply doesn't function due to the utterly crap, lazy implementation. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic low quality vector 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 mediocre 2D visuals. The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. 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. One of the important quality checks for any video game is the audio. The bare minimum of audio controls must be there, so the experience can be tailored. The audio and music must be of high quality. Bizarrely, Line/Dash doesn't even have any music at all. That's an immediately failure and yet another reason to avoid this game. 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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. 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 Line/Dash 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 game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. 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 no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Line/Dash 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.