Pick, shoot, repeat!

Lucky me has the dubious honour of writing the first review for "Pick, shoot, repeat!". "Pick, shoot, repeat!" is an extraordinarily badly made 2D retro pixel/minimalist platformer. Now, I say it's "minimalist" out of kindness.. it could just look minimalist because the graphics are bad. Anyway you've got a basic Donkey Kong looking platformer single screen arena and you shoot at red balls as they drop down. You can buy upgrades, but you can only have 2 upgrades at the same time and nothing stacks so the whole upgrade thing is pointless. There's no other progression, it's just the same balls dropping from the sky all day and all night, if you can be bothered to play. And if you can be bothered to play, you can just sit in one spot and shoot where the balls drop. There's a couple of different levels but it's all basically the same, and not worth it at all. It's difficult to suggest this even qualifies as a game, the quality is that bad. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The graphics here are some of the worst, laziest attempt at video game "art" I've ever seen. It's hard to suggest this game even has graphics. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, the kind that an infant child might be able to create in 5 minutes on MS Paint. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone. 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. It's also locked to 4:3 aspect ratio, presumably because the developer made this with a CRT from 1995 that they found in a dumpster. The controls and game handling are notably very floaty and imprecise. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing or polish done. 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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. "Pick, shoot, repeat!" didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for scoring 2500 points, trivial to get, but less than 13 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "Pick, shoot, repeat!" 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. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/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.