Phantast is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooters infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This one is notable for being one of the worst... from shovelware pushers at Shoho games, the quality is beneath that of a high school programming assignment. This is so bad it feels like someone put this on Steam as a joke.
It's an incredibly primitive, basic, bare bones top down shooter with mismatched game assets of deplorably bad quality, no sensible plot, and zero reasons for this to exist, let alone for anyone to play it.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. 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.
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 game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 140,000+ games on Steam.
One surefire way to tell that you're dealing with a lazy minimum viable product bit of junkware is if the developer didn't bother with a full set of customisation options like your resolution, control mapping, sound controls etc. Here, the developer [i]didn't include any settings menu at all![/i] If that doesn't make it clear what kind of lazy junk this is, I'm not sure what will.
The upshot of this utter failure and laziness, there's locked resolution, locked controls... you can't do anything to properly customize the experience here. That's a complete failure.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Phantast 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 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
Finally, I'm here to try help save gamers time and money by filtering out the noise and substandard games... there's up to 50 games launched on Steam Direct every day! They aren't all great... most of them suck. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and buy it... maybe you'll find the same defects I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to buy and play.
[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]
