Retrowave Road is a construction kit copy + paste game. The "developer" used the craptastic Construct 2 video game construction kit, copying + pasting and arranging premade assets, using a premade endless runner game template and slapping retro pixel assets on it so they could pretend they're an actual game developer.
This is a deplorably bad shovelware endless runner. You move up and down between three lanes, avoiding "cars" on some side scrolling highway... this is garbage that makes Flappy Bird look like a work of genius.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like NW.js (possibly Construct) should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", deadworld games 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.
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 options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2 construction kit. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). 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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. That's right, only 2. 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Retrowave Road is relatively cheap at $1 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.
[b]Note:[/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not count towards your Game Collector counts, 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.
