Magic Forest is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one is a Russian asset flip from the shady movers at Sultan.emr, the game was already banned from Steam (as KEK Story), and there's a lot of shady account juggling as the Russian asset flipper behind this tries to hide his identity, but he's previously used accounts like DIAMOND FOX and so on. Russian accounting practices at their finest! Or is it just to mislead gamers? The "developer" claims the asset flip was never removed and just changed publishers, but that's pure BS because you don't need to relist your game for another $100 USD and get a whole new appID for that... other Russian asset flippers like ImperiumGame shift their game publisher around all the time to disguise their activity. Why does the Russian "developer" behind this asset flip feel the need to tell outright lies?
Anyway, game reviews are all about the games and not the developers, no matter how shady they are. Unfortunately there's not much to say about this garbage asset flip, it doesn't exist to be a game for gamers on Steam, it's here as a cash grab and nothing more. I guess notably the assets the developer is using are ripping off the art style from actual, real games like Microsoft's famous puzzle platformer, Limbo, only worse.
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 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.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern 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 only 5 players. 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 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Magic Forest 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.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/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.
