Slab is an older game from 2018. It's a venerable 6 years old at the time of this review.
Slab is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Breakout (Copyright Atari, 1976). 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. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Atari against the "developer", but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
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. Slab is considerably worse than Breakout.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
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 10 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 100,000 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 100,000+ games on Steam?
Slab is relatively cheap at $2 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 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[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 shows an amazing, incredible level of ignorance as they go out of their way to explain they have no idea how copyright law works, as their failure to understand their liability here is rivalled only by the extent to which they are ill equipped to be a game developer (take a look at the SteamDB figures above to show how badly this Breakout ripoff failed).
The developer unleashes a word salad about how much this isn't a Breakout ripoff [i]while directly admitting, in writing, that it's a Breakout ripoff[/i]. But, frankly, that's obvious for anyone to see at a single glance. The game mechanics are [b]identical[/b]. Why would the developer be so dishonest about this? I'm guessing panic at a new, gnawing realization that they're on the hook in a big way.
While it's not the responsibility of game reviewers to educate failed developers in legal matters they obviously don't understand, I'll leave the dockets for gamers who might be interested in learning just how incredibly screwed this developer is if/when Atari files suit.
[url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18064882260025243346]Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., 863 F. Supp. 2d 394 - Dist. Court, D. New Jersey 2012[/url]. It's fascinating reading, unless you have absolutely no idea how the law works. Like this guy, who gleefully breaches Valve guidelines to self incriminate. I'm almost tempted to reach out to Atari myself, because these shameless ripoffs truly are harmful not only to the copyright holders, but to the gaming industry itself.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
