Regotown

don't read tldrs they are graphomaniac. let games live

Lucky me gets to be the first to warn gamers about Regotown. Regotown is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This is a particularly bad one, possibly one of the worst on Steam (the screenshots you see are not a joke, that's what the game actually looks like, and someone thought it would actually be okay to publish a game that looks that bad on Steam, and not only publish it, but charge FIVE BUCKS for it). If you try to take it seriously (nobody did), it's a copy + paste + reskin of the developers other game "Bat of Dead". Now, when a developer calls their game something like "Bat of Dead", that's a tacit way for them to tell us they have no idea what they are doing, without actually saying it. It's a completely crap brawler with crappy controls and some lightweight, even more crappy adventure game elements. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. 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. 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. 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. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. 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", GolGrot 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. 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 110,000 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 110,000+ games on Steam? Regotown has the utterly unrealistic price of around $5 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. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect", "Sleeping Dogs" or "Deus Ex: Human Revolution". No pixelcrap is worth $5. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly. [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] [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] A bizarre and barely coherent response that sheds light on... well, the obvious, really. The "developer" admits they don't actually know what code their game is made from but they're pretty sure (as I already said) that it's basically a copy + paste + reskin of their last game (pretty obvious for anyone to see). They also admit that they used pixelcrap because they're incapable of doing the job of a game developer properly (but hey, Steam Direct removes that rather important barrier to entry... knowing how to make games properly... which is why there's so much of this garbage on Steam now). And that's okay, not everyone is capable of being a professional game developer. However, knowing that, and choosing to publish garbage that you know is of inferior and insufficient quality on Steam despite that fact just makes gaming worse for everyone. Case in point, this disastrous crapfest of a game, which only got one (1) player playing it at any given time. That's square in the middle of what abject failure looks like. And there's literally thousands of similar garbage games on Steam, just like this one, that nobody wants or plays. This is the result of amateur developers putting their ego above any realistic assessment of their own ability as a developer (remember, these guys can't get jobs as professional game developers), and of course putting their egos far above what might be good for gamers. So it leaves it to us, the community, to warn each other about bad products like this to try help people find the genuinely good games out there, from talented professional developers. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this failure to anyone.