Ookibloks is what looks a lot like a mobile app that's in the wrong place. The game probably won't work for a lot of gamers on modern PCs. Here's why.
It's apparent that little to no testing for the game was done, at least on modern gaming PCs. In fullscreen, the game doesn't display properly, with the game area drawn outside the viewable space. This is caused by the developer not bothering to ensure the game works on resolutions over 1080p, with very high resolution monitors that use resolution scaling. Because the game area is not drawn correctly, it doesn't map to the mouse pointer properly, so the game itself simply cannot be played. Gamers shouldn't be forced to accept defective products just because developers don't bother with basic testing on PC.
If you can somehow get the game to display properly, you'll find it's a very basic "ice sliding" style game where you're positioned on a puzzle grid. You move in straight lines. Each time you move, you move until you hit an obstacle/block, then you can plan your next move. This is the basic schtick for the many Russian ClickTeam Fusion asset flips in the "Chocolate Makes You Happy" series of games, but in this case there's an added dimension of moving enemies which you must avoid by timing your moves carefully. Okay. A bit convoluted to explain, but you can get the idea pretty quick watching a gameplay video... and ultimately it's a shallow experience that would barely be worth playing on an iPhone, let alone here on Steam.
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 simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. 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, 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.
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 Ookibloks 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.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Ookibloks has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for clearing the first stage, trivial to achieve, but less than 6 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 6 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game?
Ookibloks 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.
