SUPER ASTEROIDS is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Asteroids (Copyright Atari, 1979). 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" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. This is also infringing on the Asteroids trademark from Atari, so it's likely that as soon as Atari finds out about this, it will be removed from Steam. Developers can't just steal other developers intellectual property and trademarks.
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. SUPER ASTEROIDS is considerably worse than Asteroids.
This ripoff of Atari's Asteroids is a construction kit game. The "developer" used the mediocre (and mostly code-free) Construct 2 video game construction kit, filling out input forms/using premade level design tools. While they did provide some of their own assets, these aren't exactly AAA quality game assets... when developers aren't able to use industry level game engines, often they're unable to do the other parts of game development well, either.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like Construct 2 should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Alcateia Entertainment 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.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 aforementioned choice of using Construct 2 instead of conducting real game development. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's 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.
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.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
SUPER ASTEROIDS has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) 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. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Forest", "Euro Truck Simulator 2" or "X-Com: Enemy Unknown". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
