Lucky me has the dubious honour of writing the first review for "Putrid Beasts". And possibly the only one for quite some time. This game went down like a lead balloon.
Putrid Beasts comes across as more of a lazy tech demo or weird homework assignment than a properly developed game, as the poor quality assets, zero polish, bug riddled clunky nature of this train wreck. Well, the screenshots should give you enough of an idea... this isn't just badly made, it's barely made. There's not a single sentence in the game that isn't a grammatical mess with spelling errors, too. The rest of the game is the game development equivalent of that failed attempt at writing.
The idea is that you fight off attacking enemies and feed up a bunch of low poly dogs that you sacrifice to some nasty creature in your, well, I guess it's a village or something? The graphics are so bad and lazy it's hard to tell exactly what the environment is even supposed to be. I think maybe Valve needs to consider some QA on Steam Direct just to filter out developers who are obsessed with ritually killing dogs. This ain't healthy.
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 lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
We can say with great certainty that this game is not an asset flip. This is because the assets are of such poor quality that no self respecting asset creator or artist would publish them under any circumstances.
Certainly, nobody likes to see asset recycling, stock assets are intended to be used as placeholders until superior assets can be created by the developer, but when we get what's worse than either stock assets being flipped or professional assets, it's a reason for gamers to go out of their way to avoid the product.
It's apparent that little to no testing for the game was done, at least on modern gaming PCs. In fullscreen, the game doesn't display properly, with the game area drawn only up in the top left corner of the screen. This is caused by the developer not bothering to ensure the game works on resolutions over 1080p, with very high resolution monitors that use DPI scaling for the OS UI. Because the game area is not drawn correctly, it doesn't map to the mouse pointer properly, so the game itself simply cannot be played. Gamers shouldn't be forced to accept defective products just because developers don't bother with basic testing on PC.
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, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
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 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 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?
Putrid Beasts has the total ripoff 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/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.[/quote]
