[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url]
This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote]
[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom][b]Trigger Warning: Furries.[/b][/url]
This game contains anthropomorphic animal characters.[/quote]
"Mad World Survivors" is a blatant ripoff of Vampire Survivors (Copyright Poncle, 2021). The "developer" has looked at an existing, successful game and decided that copying it was an acceptable substitute for having an original idea.
At this stage no legal action has been taken by Poncle against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
Beyond the copyright issue, the unwritten rule of cloning someone else's game is that you should at least try to improve on it. Mad World Survivors doesn't. It really is just a basic top down shooter template for Unity twisted into a Poncle ripoff, supplemented with AI slop. The Russian developer was so lazy he didn't even bother AI prompting animated characters, or working out how to do them. That's just how blatant of a cash grab this is.
BadWolf Games have close connections to known Russian asset flippers like Handmade Games. This exposes an ongoing pattern of abusing Steam with junkware to scam gamers out of a few roubles for AI slop, asset flips and other garbage.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
To make matters worse, not only does this have AI pixelcrap "art", the pixelcrap isn't even applied consistently across the whole game. That jarring mismatch ruins any genuine "retro" authenticity from this pixelcrap nightmare.
This also means the developer knew they could have done better, but maybe they chose not to, on purpose... that's a massive disservice to gamers.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" looking AI slop instead of genuinely and sincerely created game assets. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating real game assets or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision. AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here.
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, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2025), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 4 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Mad World Survivors is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
Ethics aside, given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere. AI models are trained on copyrighted intellectual property without permission from the owners. Using AI slop in a published product should be seen as supporting these copyright violations.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
