Temple Crawler is what looks like an app store reject, it's a simple cartoony "roguelike" game where you swipe your finger around on your iPhone screen to pretend you're playing a real game. The quality here is really quite low.
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 features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it 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 Temple Crawler 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.
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 3 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 download this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Nope. I wouldn't even download this on my phone. What were they thinking?
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
This is a little disturbing as the developer indicates they started stalking me and feverishly reading through my reviews... either just obsession with me on their part, or desperation to try find something in one of my other reviews that would somehow change the objectively terrible quality of this failed "game". Whatever their motivation, creeping on reviewers like this is [b]not okay[/b].
The first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
The developer is so arrogant, it's all about them, so what's good for gamers is something that never crossed their mind.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer complains, after their put their game up on the exact same platform as professionally and competently developed games by real developers, that this product has been compared to actually successful products. The developer is outraged by... well... their own failure, apparently. If the developer did not want their awful product to be compared to other products on the same platform, [i]they shouldn't have put it on that platform![/i] But this shows clearly the developer never considered the needs of you, the gamer, and your experiences and options on the Steam Store, they only thought about themselves. They're angry that you have better choices. What arrogance.
You can see how the Main Character's inflated ego and aggressive, exlusive sense of self importance led him to think it would be okay to dump a garbage, unfinished pile of junk with no value for gamers onto Steam. Because it never occurred to him what gamers would want to have.
The developer then goes straight into attacking me personally for "unprofessional" reviews (when he is guilty of the lowest level of professionalism I've ever seen from a shovelware amateur "dev" wannabe), and accuses me of being a "hater". Why would the developer attack a reviewer like this?
It's a mental coping mechanism. If the developer attacks other people, he doesn't have to face the brutal truth he's mentally unable to cope with... he's an utter failure as a game developer. This is not opinion from me, the SteamDB figures that show a peak player count of only 3 people, whose lives were immeasurably worsened by playing this garbage, is an undeniable proof of abject failure and incompetence from a weird, creepy stalker. Who makes it pretty clear he thinks he's The Main Character.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this failed garbage to anyone.
