Searching for the term "platformer" on Steam gives you over 17,000 results... there's thousands and thousands of garbage tier platformers infesting Steam. "MOONMAN: THE GAME" fits right into that category of retro 2D shovelware glutting the Steam store. Only a tiny number of those are any good, and this isn't one of them.
This is a laughably badly made pixelcrap platformer. The badly written plot has you living in some building with a gun, and I guess you have to go shoot a bunch of baddies to save the world, with some badly done platforming thrown in. The quality here is comically bad, the kind of thing you might expect an elementary school kid to come up with, but that would be unfair to elementary school kids.
In the modern era of high quality bleeding edge PC gaming, these kinds of flat, lazy, lackluster platformers just don't cut it. Platforming is a dead genre for a reason.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. Indeed the game has a "Resloution" (sic) option but this just toggles fullscreen. I think that's a great example of just how awful this game is.
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 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.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The achievements paint an unflattering picture of how the game landed with players. The most attainable achievement is "Over Achiever", dasdas, yet only 19 percent of players picked it up. Most people who own this apparently had no interest in playing it for any real length of time.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH.
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.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
MOONMAN: THE GAME is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.
The quality problems and defects with this game makes the asking price totally unrealistic. It's impossible to recommend this to gamers here on Steam.
At the end of the day, my reviews are intended to try help gamers find quality and avoid the dregs (with over 140,000 games on Steam... not all of them are masterpieces). If you think my review is wrong, definitely buy this, download it and play it... it's surely exactly the kind of game you'll love (but I doubt it will work out that way). Game reviews are for gamers to share their thoughts about games and help gamers choose where to spend valuable time or money. If my review helps you to grab or reject this game, then my job is done.
[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]
