Spooky Mahjong is a basic mobile-app like mahjong tile matching/solitaire game. Solve various puzzle levels made of stacked mahjong tiles, removing tiles by clicking on matching pairs. It's been done a million times before, for free, and free on mobile app stores too... yet this one has a hefty price tag on it. Who knew you can just charge $5 for mobile trash? I guess Creobit/8Floor does.
Worth noting, once more, the developer has stolen a bunch of pictures from the internet to use for the background for this asset flip. There's no end to the intellectual and moral dishonesty of these Russian asset flippers.
The developer, Creobit/8Floor, has copy + pasted this game TWENTY FOUR TIMES onto Steam with minor reskins... why cash in on one asset if you can cash in on multiple copies of the same game? Asset flipping begins at home! Here's a list of Creobit's copy + pastes of this asset:
[list]
[*] Asian Mahjong
[*] Christmas Mahjong
[*] Halloween Night Mahjong
[*] Halloween Night Mahjong 2
[*] Jurassic Mahjong
[*] Mahjong Business Style
[*] Mahjong Carnaval (sic)
[*] Mahjong Carnaval 2 (sic)
[*] Mahjong Gold
[*] Mahjong Gold 2, Pirate's Style
[*] Mahjong Magic Journey
[*] Mahjong Magic Journey 2
[*] Mahjong Magic Journey 3
[*] Mahjong Royal Towers
[*] Mahjong Travel
[*] Mahjong Valentine's Day
[*] Mahjong World Contest
[*] Mahjong World Contest 2
[*] Royal Mahjong King's Journey
[*] Sakura Day Mahjong
[*] Sakura Day 2 Mahjong
[*] Spooky Mahjong
[*] The Empress of Mahjong
[/list]
[i]These are all reskins of exactly the same game![/i] What value is there in this spam/pollution glutting the Steam store for gamers?
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. 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 game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes this might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
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 4 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.
Spooky Mahjong has the ridiculous 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. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam.
