Monsterland is an older game from 2015. It's a venerable 9 years old at the time of this review. It's a 2D top down shooter, but get this, it's a novel concept that I guarantee won't blow your mind, it's an ASCII/text game. Like if Hack/Rogue was a top down shooter. Yeah, told you it wouldn't blow your mind. See, just because an idea is (somewhat) novel, doesn't mean it's a good idea. Indeed, this was overwhelmingly rejected and ignored by gamers as the player counts below will show. It's not hard to see why.
But first, obviously because the developers didn't bother with any graphics, you have to use your imagination to play this one, and that's also a problem. Failing to understand that gaming is a visual medium is failing to understand gaming and game development. Not doing the job properly and using ASCII art or pixelcrap or whatever, phoning the graphics in like this, is not "clever" or "innovative", it's lazy.
There's some sci-fi theme as you're a prisoner and there's a lot of aliens/monsters, but they're just represented by ASCII characters. You can move and shoot in four cardinal directions but that's it. There's actually some depth in the design, different weapons and so on, but all of this is really wasted effort due to the failed graphics.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The text-only interface is a complete fail. Even in the 1970's, video games had graphics.
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.
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. That's right, 9 whole years this has been on Steam it only ever had 5 consecutive players peak, and that only happened once. 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Monsterland 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer claims my review contains falsehoods; there are none. The developer is quite simply full of crap and flinging every bit of crap he can throw at the wall in case something sticks, but absolutely none of it changes the objective facts of my review. The developer simply attacks me and the review in a desperate attempt to avoid accepting the fundamental truth; this is a crap game from a crap developer. And these are facts, supported by data.
Let's break this pathetic breach of guidelines down to prove just why the developer is so full of crap.
The developer claims I pretend "retro" games don't exist. Nowhere did I say that, a bold faced lie. I simply point out that this game is defective and I explain clearly why. Why did the developer immediately start off with lies? We all know why.
The developer falsely assumes this is the only account I played this garbage heap on. Another lie, of course, the developer did no research and angrily attacks just because the truth is something he's not emotionally mature enough to handle. The developer is American, by the way... it's always the American amateurs who lose thier crap when they don't get handed a participation trophy. It's also irrelevant, and here's why:
In an attempt to discredit the facts and validity of my review the developer seems to think that the game must be played for several hours before determining any objective facts about it. Apparently, before deciding a carton of rancid milk has gone sour, the developer thinks we must drink the whole carton before we're allowed to tell anyone the milk has gone off. What rubbish. [b]Playing a bad game for longer will not make the graphics better, cause the code to change, controls to become better, or fix any bugs or other defects in it.[/b] So why insist the game needs to be played longer? This is simply psychological denial on the part of the developer. This is outright delusion, unfortunately. [b]It does not take very long for the defects in this game to become apparent. Playing the game for longer will not change them.[/b]
The developer wierdly insists that plain text is the same thing as graphics. Why would they lie about something so self-evident? More lies from a crap, failed developer. Obviously it's not the same.
The developer admits the game doesn't have sufficient video options, as they tacitly confirm my own findings. I couldn't set this to 720p, or 1080p, and the developer fails to understand that Borderless Window mode doesn't properly account for DPI scaling... which any developer who knew what they were doing would know. So in one fell swoop the developer confirms the facts of my review and announces he has no idea what he is doing; he is full of crap. See the pattern here?
There's better free text only games and better games with actual graphics (yes, we all know text is not graphics), so charging $2 for something incredibly inferior is absolutely overpricing it. Another lie from a developer consistently proving that he's full of crap.
Finally, the developer demonstrates that he thinks he's smart while accidentally confessing he has no idea what ad populum fallacy is. Ad populum fallacy is where one tries to convince someone that something is true because other people may have said so. None of that has taken place here, as I don't refer to anyone else's opinion when stating the hard facts contained in my review. The developer got confused, and thought because I demonstrated the SteamDB data that shows the game was an objective failure, that somehow amounts to opinion. Unfortunately for Mr Full Of Crap, data is not opinion, it's fact. His false and misleading claim that I used a fallacy here is just one more in a litany of coping mechanisms for an objective failure of a developer.
Edit: The developer has begun stalking me, poring over my other reviews and staring at my user profile. This is weird, creepy behaviour from a failed game developer. My reviews for other games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed game. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, this game wouldn't suddenly change from text-only to having decent graphics, gameplay, nor will it suddenly become popular amongst gamers, if you recall, the peak player count was only 5 players who didn't stick around. Current SteamDB figures show practically nobody touches this. Facts don't lie.
