Summon The DUDES! is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This is very much a minimum viable product, somewhat insincerely made shovelware effort slapped together with the garbage 2D Godot engine (3D engine is okay, but no successful game was ever made with Godot2D). From primitive graphics, flimsy level design, very little content, template copy + paste look and feel... the only novel thing here is the "cloning" gimmick (you create a clone of yourself that you can use as an extra platform, etc, you know the type of platformer element), and of course the fake Russian reviews the developer paid for.
The game is very very short and can be finished in 30 minutes. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.
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 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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Godot 2D game engine/toolset (the 3D part is actually workable, but it's more complicated so a lot of amateur devs don't know how to use it). The Godot 2D component is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio), but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). 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.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian, broken English or ChatGPT AI slop, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR Part 465), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.[/quote]
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
Summon The DUDES! has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
[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]
