Piping Hot

Lucky me gets to write the first review for Piping Hot... sigh. Piping Hot is a 2D retro pixel ripoff of the Commodore Amiga game, Pipe Mania (copyright The Assembly Line 1989). This is also somewhat famous as the hacking minigame from Bioshock, although the implementation here is of inferior quality to that minigame. The game isn't notably different or better than Pipe Mania, and features almost identical gameplay as you click on various pipes to orient them in a manner that allows water to flow from the source to the destination point, thus completing the level and allowing you to move on to the next one (or not). When the ambitious business plan involves trying to get paid for an entire game that's not even as good as some other developer's minigame, it's difficult to foresee any great success. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the fixed resolution sprites/raster images 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 mediocre 2D visuals. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. 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 this is 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. 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. Piping Hot has achievments, 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 (finishing a game in less than 2 minutes has only around 4 percent of players who bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. And you can get that on the first level. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Piping Hot is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. If you really really want to play this game, go hack things in Bioshock... and of course you can play Pipe Mania free on the web, so it's impossible to suggest anyone should pay money for this deficient ripoff.