Mutant Meltdown is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is a reskin of the developers other games... basically a simple form of asset flipping, take the same game, change the assets, then you can sell the game all over again. This obviously has no value for gamers, but unethical developers don't really care about gamers, they just want money. The've done this almost a dozen times... a dozen hex based mobile app "strategy" games all alike, but with different skins on them.
Obviously my review for this is going to look a lot like my reviews for all the other "Flips" of this exact same game. There's only so many ways you can warn gamers about the same problems.
And so you can see I'm not making this up, here's a list of all the copy + pastes of this app I've found so far:
[list]
[*] Commander Bug Wars
[*] Commander: Modern War
[*] Commander: World War II
[*] Commander: Zombie Wars
[*] Expect the Unexpected
[*] Interstellar Conquest
[*] Lorhaven: Cursed War
[*] Mutant Meltdown
[*] Paths & Danger
[*] Z Dawn
[/list]
These are all reskins and reshuffles of [i]exactly the same mobile app![/i] Republishing the same game over and over again is a disservice to gamers, and the pollution it causes is harmful to everyone. It gives indie devs a bad name, and it crowds the store, making it harder for genuine developers who do the right thing to find an audience for genuinely made PC games.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, 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 lacklustre 2D visuals.
The mobile app features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. This looks bad when the attacking soldiers just "slide and bump" into the next hex. This was released in 2024, and they couldn't work out how to do animations? While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.
The developers didn't design the mobile app for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The mobile app simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
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.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this mobile app 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 18 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality mobile app is to be expected.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this mobile app as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the mobile app (to date). Until this status changes, this mobile app 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 mobile app.[/quote]
So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $10 USD, on app stores, it's $3.60. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay ALMOST THREE TIMES THE PRICE for an already overpriced mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this is a mobile app, is priced to insult and gouge PC gamers, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.
Just who do they think we are?
