"peakvox Mew Mew Chamber for Steam" is yet another of literally hundreds of mobile app Match-3/Bejewelled/Candy Crush ripoff games infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one is particularly badly made, but it does feature a slightly different mechanic as you need to drag the jewels and then let them fall to the ground in an almost Tetris like manner to form the matches. The level layouts are orchestrated which makes this more of a puzzle game than a general Bejewelled ripoff, but ultimately that's all this amounts to, same goals, same ultra causal mobile peasant gameplay... there's nothing here for PC gamers, and there's no real justification for charging money for this when these kinds of games are free in browser and on the mobile phone app stores.
The only reason this went anywhere is that it has a cat theme. Is that really all it takes for garbage to be successful?
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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 developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
The game only displays in mobile phone style ultra-pillarboxed aspect ratio. This is just one of many indications this was developed to be a mobile app and not a serious PC game. It's not acceptable for developers to dump garbage like this on Steam when it's not even formatted or designed to run properly on modern PC gaming displays, to the point that this could be considered insulting.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, even worse, it only runs in mobile phone 9:16 ultra portrait aspect ratio. This is yet another insult to PC gamers.
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.
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). It will certainly cause some red faces when people ask what the earnings were on the mobile app stores.
Regardless, for all intents and purposes "peakvox Mew Mew Chamber for Steam" 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. "peakvox Mew Mew Chamber for Steam" 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 completing the tutorial, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 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 isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of players bothered playing the game beyond the tutorial. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players 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 no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
"peakvox Mew Mew Chamber for Steam" is relatively cheap at $3 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.
