[b][quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/quote][/b]Santa's Big Adventures is an asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" stole the artwork from another game, dumped said artwork onto an Adobe Flash platformer template, and submitted it to Valve as if it was their own game.
Mihai Morosanu have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. An example of Mihai Morosanu doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/875550]Vogue, The Explorer[/url], which is really "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/tutorials/3d-game-kit-115747]3D Game Kit[/url]", written by the actual developers, Unity Technologies. Also, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/679740]Totally Mayhem[/url], which is really "[url=https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-full-game-kit-hammer-2.353481/]Full Game Kit - Hammer 2[/url]", developed by XForm Games.
Santa's Big Adventures is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Daze Before Christmas (Copyright Funcom/Sega, 1994). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. However, in this case, the Russian asset flipper behind this scam knowingly and deliberately stole artwork from Funcom and is trying to use someone else's illegally obtained intellectual property for profit, on Steam. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Funcom/Sega against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. In many regions, the deliberate copyright infringement conducted by Morosanu here is a breach of criminal law.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Santa's Big Adventures is considerably worse than Daze Before Christmas.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display.
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.
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 2016), 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.
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 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
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 only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. 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.
Santa's Big Adventures 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, and the highly unethical nature of the developer, this is impossible to recommend.
