Lucky me has the dubious honour of being the first to review yet another amateur game.
Retro Cut is yet another of literally hundreds of amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This twin stick shooter is notable for a couple of reasons, first of which is the horribly poor, gamer repelling, phoned-in graphics. Remember how gaming is a visual medium? We know that, but does the developer? Anyway.
The big selling point for this twin stick is that you can create barriers that have a few different functions, like blocking incoming attacks and so on (at a cost of some time replenished resources). This means, well, you're drawing a lot of lines all over the place while the enemies, which are so badly rendered they look like lines themselves, come and try kill you.
Here's an old axiom about novel ideas in games... just because it's a mostly original idea, doesn't mean it's a good one. This game is less fun than older twin stick shooters.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The graphics here are some of the worst, laziest attempt at video game "art" I've ever seen. It's hard to suggest this game even has graphics. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, the kind that an infant child might be able to create in 5 minutes on MS Paint. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone.
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.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
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 all-time peak player number was only 4 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.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Retro Cut is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. 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]
