"Steam and Metal" is a very badly made Russian 2D retro pixel vertical scrolling arcade bullet hell/shoot 'em up with a "steampunk" theme (although it's really irrelevant when it comes to lazy pixel "art", a pixel blob is a pixel blob is a pixel blob).
Gameplay itself is your usual Raiden ripoff only with worse graphics, handling, and shallower gameplay (not that anyone would really describe Raiden as deep). The control handling is noticeably laggy, a combination of poor game engine and just plain lazy/bad development practices and lack of testing and polish... all good reasons to avoid this, and let's get on with the rest of them.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
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 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, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Microsoft XNA Game Studio. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities.
I'm not just saying that, either, the engine was so garbage, Microsoft themselves abandoned it in 2011... that's right, this Russian trash was made with an engine over 10 years old, to pollute Steam in the hopes of gouging a few rubles from gamers. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Steam and Metal" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the first level, trivial to achieve, but less than 5 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 5 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time.
How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it.
We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
"Steam and Metal" 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.
