NeoCube is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one has a slew of problems and some interesting, but unfortunately poorly implemented gimmicks. You control a cube that can transform into a ball. In ball mode, you roll around through the platformer level like usual, but as a cube, you have a number of abilities like weight increase and so on, intended to help solve some of the puzzle platformer levels.
Interesting gimmicks are fine and well, and with overused, overdone, obsolete formats like platformers, arguably necessary. But when coupled with such a poor implementation like we see on NeoCube, it's not enough to save the game or make it a viable proposition for gamers.
Despite not being in Steam Early Access (where this arguably belongs), the game is missing features and is apparently incomplete. Due to the lack of meaningful progress from the developer, it's unlikely the game will be completed at all, yet the developers reprehensively have their hand out for money for an incomplete game. This is a good reason for gamers to avoid this.
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 2D 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 lacklustre 2D visuals.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, 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.
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, left handed 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 2 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 game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game?
NeoCube 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
