Rolling Shapes is an older game from 2015. It's a venerable 9 years old at the time of this review. It's an old physics roller puzzle game where you roll a ball (and later, other prisms) around isometric maps to get to the target point. As you progress you get access to different shapes. It's very simplistic, and yet it's still assembled very poorly, giving a clunky and unpleasant experience.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The developers have done nothing to adapt the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around the bizarre and never used 1050p 4:3 aspect ratio, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
This is really badly optimised, despite not even running at 1080p, framerates are consistently below 30, so this is a janky, unoptimised train wreck. 9 years old, they had 9 years to at least try polish the game, but didn't bother. They still want your money, though.
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 100,000+ games on Steam.
Bewilderingly, while the game includes proper audio controls, [b]they don't work!![/b] So you can't turn off the annoying game audio (it's not very good), you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the game sounds using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to bother testing 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, 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. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Rolling Shapes has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the levels that need you to use the ball shape to roll around, trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Rolling Shapes 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
