[quote][b]Warning: Broken Game![/b]
This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The movement controls just don't work at the time of this review, so you just stand there. You can shoot, you can jump, but you can't move, so you can't get to the exit.[/quote]
Pirate Island Rescue is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. It's really bad. I don't think this is an asset flip, but unfortunately, I've played asset flips of higher quality and most asset flips usually work, where this trashware platformer doesn't. Does Steam really need more 2D retro platformers? Nope. Let the genre die in peace!
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 simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
While not necessarily a deal breaker, the game does lack polish and a few elements are a little clunky/unsmooth, this is still rough around the edges. There's also some reports of bugs which may result in a negative user experience. Your mileage may vary on this.
The controls can't be customised (the developer had a note in the forums saying they added that feature but it doesn't seem to be present), which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Pirate Island Rescue 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 collecting some coins, trivial to get, but less than 37 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 all-time peak player number was only 2 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.
Because the game is broken and unplayable for me, it may also not work for other gamers. This is a solid reason to approach this game with some scepticism.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the utterly unrealistic price of $2 USD for a game they didn't even bother to test properly. Don't give it to them. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
