"Rubber Ducky and the Rainbow Gun" is a somewhat lazy, shallow 2D retro pixel single screen wave survival shooter with light platforming elements (you can jump... incredible depth in gaming right there). There's a comedy duck/rainbow theme that doesn't make much sense and adds nothing of interest to a millimetre deep game concept. Shoot waves of pixel blobs coming at you from each side of the screen and from the sky. The end.
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.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
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", John Szymanski 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.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2015), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
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. "Rubber Ducky and the Rainbow Gun" 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 starting the game, but less than 8 percent of players bothered to even play this.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 8 percent of players bothered playing the game at all. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the 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 no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
"Rubber Ducky and the Rainbow Gun" 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.
