Recoiled

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Best game 2021

Recoiled was an attempt at making a PvP only 2D 1v1 retro pixel platform shooter. This isn't a sincere attempt at making a game, it's a demo/project as the developer proudly boasts that it's their first attempt... I'm frankly not sure how that's supposed to appeal to gamers, for whom Steam is all about. It probably seems amazingly clever for amateur "developers" who don't know how to make games properly to have something compile so they can then quickly fork over $100 USD to self publish the junk on Steam. But at no point has the developer considered gamers, who have to put up with all these terrible products. What's telling about this is the weird flex from the developer who seems proud that this trash is their first attempt at a game. This is actually something to be ashamed of, because it's an embarrassing admission to gamers that they should expect a product of poor quality. Thankfully, game development isn't the same as other industries such as, say, airbags in cars or the hard work of cardiac surgeons. But imagine for a minute, after a horrible disaster, someone you loved died on an operating table, and the surgeon comes in with a big smile on his face and says "That was my first attempt! I couldn't afford to hire any nurses or an anaesthetist, or any proper operating instruments, so I used a pocket knife and did it all by myself! Aren't I great!? I'm a surgeon now!" Yeah... being ill equipped to do a job properly is nothing to boast about at all. So why should gamers be expected to put up with this kind of failure? Nobody should be proud of doing a job badly. Nor is Steam a "training ground" for developers... that's what game development courses at educational institutions are for. And it's not just my personal opinion (however qualified that opinion might be) that this is a terrible game. SteamDB shows the game peaked at only 8 players at launch, which is a pitiful number, and now the game has practically no players, with usually just one player logging on briefly once or twice every week. It's dead. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! First up the game visuals are terrible, the overall quality here is woeful. A choice was made to use obsolete 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. Resolution and controls are locked, and can't be changed or customised to improve the visuals or the control experience. These flaws push this game far below minimum acceptable standards for PC. A perverse design decision was made to lock the game down to 1v1 deathmatches, a model that is never going to appeal to anyone. Without the variability and chaos introduced by multiple players, the game is immediately tedious. PvP gamers have literally thousands of games to choose from, hundreds of AAA games that are either free or cost next to nothing. Games have to actually offer something if they want to compete for players time. A couple of final notes... the game is free, which is really the only tolerable way to publish this kind of demo/project on Steam, but even then it's unrecommendable. Also, the game features a number of fake/joke reviews, as usual, when a game is incredibly bad, the comedians come out of the woodwork with hilarious reviews such as "best game evar!!!" and "this game cured my cancer and saved my marriage" and so on. The positive review score for this game should be disregarded.