Splat Arena is a construction kit copy + paste game. The "developer" used the craptastic GameMaker Studio video game construction kit, copying + pasting and arranging premade assets, using premade level design tools so they could pretend they're an actual game developer. It's worth noting that the developer has had multiple games banned from Steam already and it's quite remarkable Valve have let a few like this one slip through. It's not clear what the crime was, obviously being terrible quality doesn't count, because Valve doesn't care about that. Sentinels of the Store seems to suggest it's for review manipulation, but whatever the reason, bad games from unethical developers being removed from Steam is always good for gamers.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", StarSystemStudios 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.
Splat Arena is a very badly made 2D top down twin stick shooter made by copying a GameMaker Studio blueprint and slapping some "borrowed" assets on it, plus a bit of MS-Paint work from the "developer" when he worked out he wasn't banned hard enough and could still dump shovelware onto Steam, re-releasing many of his games that were already banned. Whew.
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 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.
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.
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 2 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.
The game contains a bunch of "free" assets from various sources, but the "developer" here has not credited the people who actually did the work for the game. There's no way to independently verify that the developer really does have permission to use other people's intellectual property and copyrighted works apart from "trust me, bro". And given this developer has already been banned from Steam, can you trust them?
Regardless, the vast majority of this game is essentially built from the work of others, lazily slapped together by a would-be "developer" who wants to get paid for someone else's work. At the very least, this is deplorable intellectual and creative bankruptcy. Gamers should understandably be cautious about giving money to someone for work they didn't even do.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Splat Arena 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. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk. This developer has had many games banned previously, and there's no guarantees this crapware won't suffer the same fate.
[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]
