[Quote][b][URL=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware]Spyware Warning![/URL][/b] This game acts as spyware and performs personal data gathering and transmission. There's no immediate apparent way to opt out. This is completely unethical and reprehensible. Gamers must be aware of the dangers of installing this harmful software and should avoid this completely.[/Quote]
[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b]
This game requires you to create a third party "PlayFab" account... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account.
This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.[/quote]
[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b]
This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote]
There's no shortage of absolutely crap games on Steam thanks to Steam Direct, that lets anyone publish any garbage at all onto Steam if they spend $100 USD. But amongst the crap there's a special class of awful game where it's immediately apparent that the "developer" spent more time on the microtransactions and toxic monetisation than they did making the game itself. And that's where we come to this... thing. "SHOOTEM" is a bare bones MS-Paint twin stick PvP shooter with no players, that barely works, has nothing in it, but has a remarkably fleshed out toxic cash shop.
So, "SHOOTEM" is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
[i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.
First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.
On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer lists a bunch of things that confirm many of the facts of my review, this is dead garbage that nobody wanted, the developer has no idea what they were doing, etc etc. I already said this was a failure with only 7 concurrent players, but when developers breach Valve guidelines it's harmful to all of us.
Oh, speaking of harmful, the developer drops a nuke... THIS IS SPYWARE. The developer is collecting personally identifiable information and storing it unsafely in the cloud in [b]DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE GDPR.[/b]
So, while the developer spies on gamers and evades capture by the authorities and the legal repurcussions of his law breaking, I'm amending this review to better warn gamers about this cancer.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review, but I have amended the review to warn gamers about the developer spying on gamers, collecting and doing whatever else with our data. I cannot recommend this spyware to anyone.
