Santa's Last Stand is not the worst game on Steam, that gets relegated to the utter cringe of RPG Maker asset flips and Ren'Py e-books, both of which feature the worst cringe writing ever known to mankind and zero valuable gameplay. No, Santa's Last Stand is not as bad as that. But it is truly awful in its own way.
It's an MS-Paint/Flash tier top down twin stick shooter of deplorably lazy quality. Shoot waves of incoming elves as you take on the role of Santa with a gun. I guess someone is bitter they're on Santa's naughty list. And why? Because they used disgusting AI slop for their marketing material for this train wreck.
Making a bad game is one thing, the developer just wasted $100 USD to flog a few game keys in to DIG bundles. But the use of AI slop is a direct and deliberate insult to gamers and genuine, ethical content creators. It's never okay.
The game is still being developed, but development is slow enough that the game appears to be headed to Development Hell. While there's still time before the game reaches the developers committed deadline to complete the game, it's only getting very small updates. Given the player count (see below, try not to laugh), it's unlikely this will be completed, there's no reason to.
There's no reliable indication the game will ever be completed, which is another reason for gamers to avoid this. It's important to remember that only about 25% of Early Access games ever get completed... the vast majority of Early Access games are abandoned and all money taken from gamers is never refunded. Early Access games are a huge risk and in general should be avoided.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint.
It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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, left handed 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 2025 (and this was released not so far back in 2025), 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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH.
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 110,000 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 110,000+ games on Steam?
Santa's Last Stand has the cash grab price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel", "Mass Effect 2" or "Middle Earth - Shadow of Mordor". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[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]
