Swapperoo

Swapperoo is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. It's yet another of literally hundreds of mobile app Match-3/Bejewelled/Candy Crush ripoff games infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. They tried to differentiate from Candy Crush slightly here in that you can't just move the tiles around, you're given very specific tiles that have special moves (like swapping, being removed etc) but this doesn't really change up the old, tired, dead match-3 gameplay that iPhone gamers inexplicably love so much. Did I mention my gaming rig is not an iPhone yet? I will, and not for the last time. From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic low quality vector art assets used to make the mobile app, 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 mediocre 2D visuals. Candy Crush had nice images of candy, Bejewelled has gams... so at the design meeting, they just said "No just plain tiles. Tiles. We'll do tiles. Tiles are great. Let's make them pastel. People love bland pastel tiles way more than cake or jewels. I'm a mobile app developer. Let's launch it on Steam." At least that's how I imagine it went. Who knows how such garbage games get designed, let alone dumped here on Steam. The developers didn't design the mobile app for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The mobile app 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 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. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Swapperoo didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the mobile app, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for matching 8 tiles, trivial to get, but less than 19 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the mobile app. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 19 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this mobile app? Trading cards. People 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 mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Swapperoo has the laughable 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.