Piatka is, well, Hangman. You know, the old pen and paper (or blackboard/whiteboard) school game where you choose a random word, and the players must guess the word. Players take turns calling out letters, and if the letter is in the word it's revealed, giving a better guess at what the word might be... and if it's not, that's a strike... run out of strikes and the players lose.
The hanging man is gone, there's a clue teddy bear instead... but ultimately this is still Hangman, and that's a problem. I've reviewed more than 11,000 games on Steam now, I've played more video games than anyone else on the planet, in human history, and yet this game still makes me wonder why on earth anyone would spend $100 to put this on Steam. Was the intent just to make Steam slightly worse with what might as well be a browser/Flash game?
And if this seems harsh, remember, you can play Hangman for free on mobile or on the web... these guys actually want to get paid money, they want your money, for a Hangman game. I'm sure you're rushing to add more Steam funds right now so you can slam this into your shopping cart and make it yours, but hold off, because there's the usual list of technical defects.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. 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 game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. 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.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
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 3 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? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Piatka 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.
