"meleng" is minimalist Russian shovelware, another mobile app/browser like game, where you tap on your iPhone screen to put diagonal lines in squares. Tapping twice changes which of the two corners the line touches. At the corner of some squares, there's a marker that tells you whether or not it should be at the end of one of the diagonal lines. The puzzle, then, is to fill the grid (which is a labourious, boring job) with diagonal lines and make sure all the markers are satisfied with 1, 2, 3, 4 or "don't care" number of lines touching them. What excitement, not.
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.
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.
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 "meleng" 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.
One of the driving elements of this shovelware game is "achievement spam", that is to say the game features a ridiculously large number of trivial/automatically granted achievements, 118 of them, in fact, of which you get over 50 for just starting the game. Obviously these fake achievements have no real value and prove no skill or competence from gamers, they just exist to gouge some cash from gamers who don't care whether achievements are meaningful or not. It's a damning indictment for this shovelware that people only bought it for easy achievements, and not because it has any serious merit as a real game.
"meleng" is relatively cheap at $1 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.
