Pixel Survivors is an abandoned attempt at making a lightweight 2D retro pixel Dwarf Fortress ripoff, but without the depth, theming (it's generic and bland) or any of the other compelling features.
Despite not being in Steam Early Access (where this arguably belongs), the game is missing features and is apparently incomplete. Due to the lack of meaningful progress from the developer, it's unlikely the game will be completed at all. Although this is incomplete, the developer is still trying to profit from this by putting it on sale, removing it from Early Access despite being incomplete... this is all unethical behaviour intended to mislead gamers into buying a bad product, just so the developer can profit from it. That's really not okay.
Because this is incomplete, it's really badly polished. There's a tutorial that's completely nonsensical and it's obvious the developer doesn't know any English, because it's indecipherable. You can click around and sort of work out how to do things. Like Dwarf Fortress, the game is largely declarative, that is to say you lay down plans for what you want the people to do and they more or less do it. I guess. It's hard to tell because the game interface is completely awful, with little in the way of meaningful game feedback... this is just junk, and while it's not an asset flip and at some point the developer might have even been sincere about it, it's garbage.
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.
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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Patagoniart has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Pixel Survivors 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 50 wood, trivial to get, it happens automatically within a few minutes of starting a game, but less than 12 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.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 12 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Pixel Survivors has the comically over-optimistic price of around $4 USD, 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.
